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âWe realized that we needed to go out to tender nationally for our BMS and HVAC service contracts. We needed to transition these contracts from what was traditionally a plan-preventive-maintenance approach to a much more data-driven approach that ensured we created a collaborative engagement between our service contractor, the analytics vendor, and AMP.
Without that collaboration, we realized that just deploying analytics was not going to get us to the outcome that we wanted to get to."
âTom Balme
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Episode 92 is a conversation with Tom Balme, Building Optimization Manager at AMP Capital, and Bryce Anderson, Independent Building Automation Consultant at Lifecycle Controls.
This is the most Iâve learned in developing a podcast in a long time. If youâre new to the business of building automation, and specifically building automation maintenance contracts, then this is for you.
AMP Capital has one of the largest portfolios of buildings in Australia. Theyâve set out to transform their building operating processes to be more data driven. Well that involves two main stakeholders: the service contractors that maintain the many building automation systems across the portfolio and the analytics software providers that are the newcomers on the block.
AMPâs journey to get all of these stakeholders on the same page is a story with lessons for all of us. They share how theyâve simultaneously reduced preventative maintenance contract costs, improved analytics software ticket closure rates, and reduced unplanned reactive work order costs.
Please enjoy.
You can find Tom and Bryce on LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
Music credit: Dream Big by Audiobingerâlicensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: hello friends, welcome to the nexus podcast. I'm your host James dice each week. I fire questions that the leaders of the smart buildings industry to try to figure out where we're headed and how we can get there faster without all the marketing fluff. I'm pushing my learning to the limit. And I'm so glad to have you here following along.
James Dice: This episode is a conversation with Tom balm, building optimization manager at amp capital and Bryce Anderson. Independent building automation consultant at lifecycle controls. This is the most I've learned in developing a podcast in a really long time. If you're new to the business of building automation and specifically building automation, maintenance contracts.
Then this is for you. Amp capital has one of the largest portfolios of buildings in Australia. They've set out to transform their building [00:01:00] operating processes, to be more data-driven. Well, that involves two main stakeholders. The service contractors that maintain the many building automation systems across the portfolio.
And the analytics software providers that are the newcomers on the block for each building. And P his journey to get all of these stakeholders in the same page. It's a story with lessons for all of us, they share how they simultaneously reduced preventative maintenance contract costs, improved analytics, software ticket, closure rates, and reduced unplanned reactive or recorder costs.
This is a good one. Please enjoy. All right.
Hello, Tom and Bryce. Welcome to the nexus podcast. Let's start with you, Tom. Uh, can you give us your background? Who are you? Can you introduce yourself please?
Tom Balme: Sure. Hi Jameson. Thank you for having us. It's great to be here. Um, so. I worked for amp capital amp capital is a global investment manager with over $150 billion of funds currently under management on behalf of [00:02:00] global investors.
Um, and within the real estate sector, we, one of the largest direct real estate fund managers in APAC with, uh, circa 23 billion in real estate assets currently under management. Uh, my role at amp, uh, is to manage our portfolio wide asset technology deployments, which includes things such as building analytics, frameworks, AI cybersecurity.
James Dice: Very cool. And where are you calling in from your long, long time listener? First time caller, as people say, w where are you calling?
Tom Balme: So calling in from Sydney, Australia? Uh, yes. Have been, I've been listening to the podcast. Uh, I think since the inception, I mean, when we first caught up James, it must've been sort of like three, four years ago.
And I think I was at CIM. Uh, I think we just continued chatting every now and then, um, since that point.
Bryce Anderson: Awesome.
James Dice: All right. And Bryce, you and I just met a couple of weeks ago through Tom's introduction. Do you want to give, uh, [00:03:00] your self-introduction? Who are, who
Bryce Anderson: are you? Yeah, sure. So, um, I'm actually also in Australia, in Melbourne, um, like an hour and a half flight from Sydney.
So we're pretty close, I guess. Um, I'm a BMS sort of specialist consultants, uh, worked for BMS company. For about 15 years in South Africa, London had been in Australia since 2010. And after about 15 years, I've worked with BMS companies and, it's not easy, heavy construction projects, those sort of things.
I decided to try and get out of that. So in around 2014, I went into consulting. So for that the last sort of eight years or so, I've been doing BMS consulting. Most of my customers are either, um, working direct to the owner, being BMS upgrades, specifications, tenders, construction phase. Um, and then I also do quite a bit of new construction work where I'm normally a sub consultant to the mechanical consultant or the builder head contractor, or sometimes independent commissioning agents.
I've got this sort of [00:04:00] even mix across new construction as a BMS specialist, sub consultant or director building owners kind of sought out BMS problems. And then, so that's my main core business, how pay the bills and into the side of that. Um, I have, uh, a small BMS training business. We've had some training courses for mechanical consultants and, BMS engineers.
And I have this YouTube channel, which I sort of started at the start of COVID when I couldn't go anywhere on the weekends. So I was just sitting here staring at Sunday. What should I do? So for two years, on Sundays, I just recorded YouTube videos. That's more difficult. Now my newest resolution for this year is not to work weekends.
So yeah, no videos through February in front of sort of balance that. But that's what it is. A BMS specialists don't ask me anything.
James Dice: Awesome. And for those of you listening that haven't checked out Bryce's channel, which probably, probably most of the people that listen to this show have at least seen one of your videos before.
Um, he's got what [00:05:00] 2000 followers at this point, which is pretty, pretty awesome
Bryce Anderson: and great at milestone. Like last week I was watching it on the weekend, just ticking over. So maybe like in a hundred years I'll get a YouTube, one of those little play banner things when need a hundred thousand, but yeah, it was quite hard, like a thousand a years.
Very difficult to, to get it's a very niche
Tom Balme: industry.
Bryce Anderson: Yeah.
James Dice: Yeah. Tell me about it. Um, I. I love your passion. So you're, you're, you're sitting in the same spot you're sitting in right now. And you're like sometimes like hitting the table and like really, really talking about how things could change. So I love that.
Um, all right. So we got together today to talk about a recent project that you guys have been working on. Um, and we'll talk about it in sort of like a case study analysis mode, but it's also directly applicable to so many buildings across the world. So we're going to shut up, try to tell the story in a way that, um, applies to everybody.
Um, but maybe Tom, you could, you could [00:06:00] maybe just maybe start us out. Um, can you kind of talk about the situation you were in when you're, when you're thinking about trying to shift to data-driven maintenance and then why you brought in Bryce to kind of help things out.
Tom Balme: Look, I mean, um, I think like a lot of sort of other people in this space, I sort of fell into this industry. Um, I, I finished university and, didn't, didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go, but I, knew I wanted to work somewhere that had like a.
Impact on the, on the climate. And this is where I, I was over in the UK and I, I found that I got picked up by a sort of large multi-discipline, uh, building services consultancy. And I, she started out as a what's called like an environmental sustainable design engineer. So ESD for short ASD was this sort of like hybrid between like classic mechanical engineering with building performance modeling and then sustainable design.[00:07:00]
It was really, it was really the building performance modeling. They actually caught me hooked on buildings. You would build these, these models of buildings pre-construction, uh, in using these wonderful programs. Like I S uh, and Bentley, uh, hap and, you would then, build these models and you're parametrically also the design parameters, like window to wall ratios, more efficient chillers led lighting, uh, that kind of thing.
And then, you'd see how much energy the building would use before, before you constructed it. Um, and then, following on from doing the model. I then started doing audits of buildings, uh, where we know you would walk around and as you get your nose into these existing buildings and you serve the condition of the mechanical plants, uh, you'd access the BMS and downloads of whatever trend data you could kind of get out of it, which at the time, re really wasn't that much.
And then you'd come up that, shopping list of sort [00:08:00] of energy conserving measures to come back to the client with. Um, and that's where I looked back and I realized like, what I was doing was almost like the human version of building analytics before analytics was ever a thing.
Um, trying to understand what was going on and finding, finding discrepancies and faults and, uh, and issues. And, this is where I really started seeing the Delta and the difference between the buildings that I was modeling pre-construction and then what was actually out there in the real world would be.
With things that you would pick up on site, like, why is equipment running 24 7 and why the pumps have like a VSD installed, but running it like a hundred percent speed there's this discrepancy. Right. And I couldn't rationalize it. Um, and it was during that time when I was doing an order, I think I was over in Canada at the time, I stumbled across this sort of other new technology, which was building analytics.
One of the buildings I was auditing had analytics [00:09:00] installed and the FM had access to it. And all of a sudden it provided me with all of these trends that I would painstakingly have to try and get out of the VNF like a bit a mess myself. Um, and then, analyze and spreadsheets, all of a sudden, all this wonderful trend data was there.
It was available and, and it automatically. Yeah, a whole bunch of recommendations that I would spend hours deliberating on an analyzing just to get to a point of saying, oh, like, did you know X, Y, Z. Um, and, and this kind of blew my mind. It was like, okay, this is, this is the future. Like I kind of saw it and got it.
And that's when that's, when eventually I came back to Australia and ended up working for, for CIM, uh, one of the sort of largest building analytics providers over here in Australia, um, working in both the engineering side and sales side, uh, eventually before, getting, getting a call to come join client side with amp, [00:10:00] it was too good to refuse.
So it's been, um, been an interesting journey up to this point and let's put
Bryce Anderson: it this way. Tom and I met was about five years ago. I'd been engaged to run an analytics tenders out on an analytics specification and ran a tender phase. But for analytics and Tom was one of the tenders and like many situations now he's the customer.
James Dice: Well, I, I identify so much. And Tom, you and I probably talked about this the first time we met a couple years back, but that journey was like so similar to my journey into analytics as well. And I'll point people back to the podcast with Leon, Wurfel from bueno. That was exactly his path as well. We're all doing this, we're all doing this in spreadsheets.
I would even add that I was installing data loggers. So a lot of times you didn't even have the data in the BMS. So you're out there installing data loggers to even get the data, to even get it into the spreadsheet.[00:11:00]
Tom Balme: I mean, you kind of tell people who getting into the industry. We just assume that this like data and analytics has always been there and it's like, I promise you, it definitely wasn't, getting, getting data out of a BMS was really hard work, whatever trend there were were often, no, not longer than like seven days old and not all points were trended.
And, like it never used to be this way. Um, but you know, it definitely gave me like a really good appreciation of, just what a jump analytics made for people that were consulting in existing buildings. And, I, I think starting out in that, in that consultant type world before then making the jump over to the technology has given me a good appreciation of just what kind of benefits it delivers.
James Dice: Absolutely. All right. So, so at ANP, take us through kind of how you're trying to, uh, implement analytics and kind of what your goals are.
Tom Balme: Yeah. So the journey with amp was, um, that's, [00:12:00] they, they were looking for one analytics provider across the entire portfolio. Uh, before I joined amp, they had, uh, a number of providers.
Um, typically the incumbent Bemis contracts would have their own analytics solution deployed, uh, or there were some independent, third party solutions also deployed across a range of assets. We, we have over 60 buildings that we manage across, commercial office, retail, shopping centers and logistics of which about 40 or so have a BMS, and about 10 to 15 of those had analytics deployed.
And so what they were looking for was, a portfolio wide solution which could then be deployed to streamline the delivery of analytics, provide standardized reporting, all the sort of benefits that come from having one solution across, across an entire portfolio. And so, before I joined the actually they decided to roll out and switch automation as the building analytics [00:13:00] provider across the portfolio.
And a big part of why they asked them to join amp was to manage that roll out process and to help, I suppose, make that transition over to data driven maintenance. What AMP were looking to do was to not just deploy analytics and just, say, hey, walk away, that's our Dodger and maintenance solution done dusted.
What we were discovering when we had switch deployed was that we were still in encountering some of the really old traditional blockers that, I think a lot of people who've worked in analytics, had encountered. You would have a monthly meeting with your HVAC and your BMS service contractor, each at the sites.
And at some sites, some contractors, were still refusing to walk up to a meeting because it wasn't in their contract. It wasn't part of their existing deliverables and scope and other buildings. I think anyone who's worked in analytics has probably come across this exact scenario where [00:14:00] you rock up to a managed service meeting and you're presenting the same issue month after month.
And wondering why is this not getting closed out? And the answer, isn't the fact that like the fault is bad, that it's a false positive, or that the insight isn't genuine or accurate. The issue was more the fact that the contractor didn't have any, it wasn't part of their scope to actually listen and allow time in their day to actually close out these issues.
And this is where we realized that we needed to also go out to tender nationally for our BMS and HVAC service contracts. And we needed to transition these contracts from what was traditionally a plan-preventive-maintenance approach to a much more data-driven approach that ensured that we created a collaborative engagement between our service contractor, the analytics vendor, and AMP. Without that collaboration, [00:15:00] we realized that just deploying analytics was not going to get us to the outcome that we wanted to get to
James Dice: got it. And so that's when we brought in Bryce to sort of help help with
Tom Balme: that's. Right. We, I mean, I, I started reviewing our BMS contracts across the portfolio and we started thinking about ways that we could drive collaboration and engagement between the analytics vendor and the BMS contractor.
And we, we actually created a specification, um, with the help of a mechanical con consultant. And specification was, pretty good. Uh, and we'd also just, I suppose, explained all of the outputs and reporting and dashboards that would come from the switch platform. Um, and I sort of realize that, other than, the Bemis contract has Rocky up to a meeting and closing out a few handful of faults every month where we actually [00:16:00] going to change the behaviors of the BMS contractors.
So where are we actually solving the problem of this engagement piece between the contractors? And that's where I realized that we really needed the specialist advice of someone who's worked in the BMS service industry and can help guide us in this transition towards data drew made sense. So that's where I got in contact with Bryce and we took him through what we created and we just asked Bryce with what we've created, is this going to lay the foundation to start solving the problem?
Uh, and for us, his reaction was pretty blunt. Uh, he just said, okay, No, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was just a flat, no, where like, just explaining one analytics platform creates and does doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to change the behavior of the BMS contracts on the site.
They're largely still going to be doing planned preventative maintenance. So this is where we have Bryce to step in, uh, and provide his expertise.[00:17:00]
James Dice: before you get going on this. For anyone, that's a beginner to this topic and doesn't understand how these things work. Could you just explain from the standpoint of your expertise, kind of what Tom just said?
So we have analytics software, it's identifying faults that needed to be fixed in the BMS. And then we have a contractor that is the, the one that needs to solve that problem for the owner. Can you, can you kind of explain that dynamic? Like why is it their job to fix it? Why, why is it set up in this way?
Bryce Anderson: Yeah, so the thing is with, cloud-based technology providers and analytics is there's a lot of roadblocks for it to actually be effective and successful and, simply by analytics and providing. Although it spits out useful information, valuable insights. Um, that doesn't mean you gonna get a good outcome and what I've, since might've been [00:18:00] restructuring maintenance contracts for that five years, what I've realized is I can write anything in a maintenance specification.
I can say to that, you must collaborate with the technology provider and you must do this, and you must do that. And you must allow for optimization and energy efficiency and enhancements. I can write all this in specification. That doesn't mean you actually going to get the outcome because there's real roadblocks in the way that just words in a document don't resolve.
Um, so as, as Tom was saying, they had the specification, which said all the right things, how to say to them saying the wrong things, isn't going to get you there. We've got to address every single road. And solve that problem. Um, the specification is it's one tool. It's a piece of the puzzle to an overall solution.
It's a piece of that puzzle. It's not, not the whole solution and that's the mistake some people make. Um, so [00:19:00] the problem we're having with Thomas saying there is, um, a building owner, let's say they're spending, a hundred thousand Australian dollars on a preventative maintenance contract.
The miss camp is getting paid to come to site one day a week and do preventative maintenance. In other words, check every single piece of equipment in theory. Yeah. 12 month cycle. What happens is that building owners Ingo has spent $20,000 a year, Australian dollars a year on some technology and predictive maintenance.
And know the idea is that. Well, we're investing $20,000
Tom Balme: so that we have,
Bryce Anderson: we can reduce our service hours, our physical checks, and it should offset. So should go from a hundred thousand dollars contract up to one 20 and efficiencies brings it back down to a hundred that's what's supposed to happen. Like that makes sense to everybody.
The problem is that BMS companies and rightfully so, don't want to give away $20,000 of revenue on every single site. They have KPIs to increase their revenue every year and make [00:20:00] more money, not to make less money. So the issue is that I always say to building owners, if you're a, if you're a building owner and you want to deploy technology, or if you're an analytics company who has a product to sell, both of you have to address the BMS as part of that.
Um, because what I've noticed happens is that. Definitely in the last five years, it might be changing now, but a lot of BMS comp, a lot of analytics companies tend to try and beat up the BMS company. They think that they're run the analytics engine and it spits out all these faults and they say the owner, we can't amazing.
We are no, we've just done all these broken things. These BMS scars are terrible. They're so bad. You should give us more of your buildings. Like that's the strategy. But what happens is the BMS company gets upset about that and digs their heels in. And does the things that Tom said, they were saying they won't come to meetings, not proactively responding to alerts.
They're not [00:21:00] like being a part of the complete solution. So the first thing is at least competing to realize that for your system to be effective, you have to work with the BNS company. Everybody has to be happy. If someone's unhappy, you've Tom's not happy. Well, I'm not happy or the LED's not happy, or you're also happy someone's going to be, there's gonna be a problem.
Right. So. You. And that's why we get, when we very first started the journey between IP myself, we decided that we're going to do this thing, but at no point, are we going to beat up the BMS company or try and disadvantage them? They're all going to lose something. And I can example of this being a process was where, um, we built a spec first, right?
And it solved a lot of our problems. And I said to Tom, if we issued a spec to over 30 camp, 30 sites, over 14 different companies, they're gonna have a heart attack. And they're going to get very defensive about how we're trying to, because we were completely changing entirely how this works. So I said to Tom, look, why don't [00:22:00] we set up a live stream with every single company?
And I will present this thing to them in just like normal talk. And I said to them, look, guys, you know, I'm gonna be honest with you. You're not going to like this, but we can't continue. To be processing a maintenance on the same model as preventative maintenance model. We can't continue to price like that when we're running technology and it's changing.
So why is she wanting to mention that part about that first live stream was we had to take the BMS company on a journey with us. That's what had to happen. We couldn't just try and be too heavy handed with it. So the point here is really that, to solve this problem, it's, it's a process and lot of work, it's not just a document.
The document doesn't do anything. Like we ha aspects says that in the morning, before lunch, you will do this. And then off you had a sandwich for lunch, that's taken off the day. You will do this. This is how we're gonna measure you. [00:23:00] One of the BMS copies didn't mind that they said, well, that's great because now we know exactly how you're gonna measure us.
We know the end of the year, we have a satisfied customer. With the moment now we don't have satisfied customers generally. So I guess, yeah, that's what the main problem was. I guess. So Tom and him did a lot of work before I got there, as he said, they had done a lot of analysis around their current portfolio and they gave me these big spreadsheets that had all the sites in and, and how many, what the preventative maintenance costs were per year for the sites and another column, which was, this is how much money we're spending for each site on additional work orders.
And when I saw that number at the bottom, I could not believe that the amount of money that amp was spending on preventative maintenance, like million dollar numbers and the percentage of additional cost on top of that for work orders was unbelievable. So when we started this, we all had different sort of [00:24:00] objectives.
My objective personally was that Tom wanted me to write, build something that facilitates. Forced the collaboration between the technology providers and the DMS companies, not just with scoping words, but credit process, that makes it happen. But what I wanted to do was I wanted to, um, try and reduce the work orders because a lot of the stuff that was being charged for us as extras in my mind should be a part of normal maintenance.
So the big piece around restructuring around what is now considered additional work, it's clear, it's defined that, logging into the workflow management tool of the X platform is not additional responding to those alerts going and fixing things, coming back, logging back in, taking it off. That's not extra work.
Tuning is not extra work option optimizations on extra work, going to meetings is not extra work. And we had to obviously change how we do things to free up the time to do that. But, and the other thing I wanted to do was this is a really [00:25:00] key part. My current specifications, before this journey or. I just document this amazing documents.
Um, but it required a lot of my time to make the process work. I'd have a lot of meetings with one-to-one the BMS company, lots of renegotiations around Anglosec. Why does that cost that like read this part of the spec. It tells you what to do. Lots of that sort of education piece. When Tom came to me and said, we've got to roll this out across the whole portfolio, I was like, oh my gosh, like my thing can go across the whole portfolio because I can't fight with 14 companies over 30 sites.
So I had to build this complete new spec that was designed in a way that it could go out across a whole portfolio. And, um, it come back and didn't require a lot of work from us. So what I did, one of the things was, I didn't want to have to review, 30 or so mate's proposals and read these proposals that all were formatted differently and set things differently and include different things.
I cried. These tend to forms for the tender foreman, [00:26:00] answer these questions. Break your cost down like this. And that was like a big thing. So we, a lot of success there that amp wants to in every two years, re-issue the tender across their incumbents because they've tweaked something or they're getting more effective results from technology.
It's like, it's a simple thing. We re-issued the process bang. It goes, there comes back in a month. We're done, so I really wanted to try and create this sort of scalable solution. So to summarize that, the first thing we had to do was facilitate better collaboration. There was a person we had to do, and we did that.
There was, that was good and easy enough. The second thing was to create transparency in processing. I just want to just touch on for a second. When Tom gave you back all these spreadsheets of the whole portfolio and we'd filtered the sods from the biggest. The smallest sites, the cost for maintenance was not the highest to the lowest.
We would, we looked at the pricing was [00:27:00] completely random. It's just like all over the place. Two buildings, exact same size, double the process. So what we managed to create, which is really proud of is amp now has a baseline for what maintenance costs, because there's a structure to it. And it's clear what has to be done, not get done.
So we now have the biggest buildings cost the most and the smallest Williams cost the least. And it it's like that. Now there are places where it jumps around a bit because there's other challenges with some of the buildings are older when you, whatever it is. But generally we now know what maintenance costs, regardless of who the provider is.
So yeah, I guess Tom had like a wishlist of these are the things we're trying to achieve. And my job was to, to take that wishlist of stuff and build something. And achieve that. That was like, that was the main focus of the project, which, which was like per difficult.
James Dice: It sounds like it. So I want to key in, on two things before we kind of [00:28:00] go further with this story.
One is Tom, can you explain the, the difference between a task that you would expect as the owner now that you're on the owner side, you would expect to be underneath the maintenance contract and then a task that you were getting charged, these reactive work orders for, and then maybe like throw in, where does the analytics task come in?
How do you think about these sort of three buckets of tasks? Clarify that for people.
Tom Balme: I suppose, when we were starting to have a switch person engaged across the portfolio, and we were attending these, these, these, monthly managed service meetings, we found this incredible discrepancy and variability in what contract is deemed to be included as part of their scheduled maintenance and what was done outside of scheduled maintenance.
And they would have to charge additional for, um, in a incredibly extreme example. I think we chatted about this before we [00:29:00] rocked up to one service meeting and the contract was being asked to calibrate some senses. One of them was a zone temperature sensor, and there was an issue with it. It needs to be calibrated in the contract to say, yes, of course I'll do that.
As part of my scheduled maintenance, the second sensor was a VAV air flight center. And when we reviewed it, the contract said, yeah, look, actually, I'm going to get a ladder and get up into the ceiling space. I'm going to need a work order for that. That is not included. It was like this, this isn't included.
And it was just sort of like, this was, what do you mean? It's not included and it's just go, well, that's going to take me a bit more time. I have to get a ladder to get up into the ceiling space. And so it was, it was just sort of like, do you have a ladder causing your contracts so I can kinda, kinda showing it there's, there's there's ladder clause saying that a ladder, is something that you deem chargeable and extra, but you know, it, what it really highlighted was that we had absolutely no visibility or transparency on what a [00:30:00] contractor den chargeable or not chargeable.
It had been left up to them. And often we would just approve these work orders because the time, they would communicate to us that, I need to spend most of my time doing all these other things as part of my plan prevented maintenance and a lot of the tasks that were coming out of sweater.
Or any billing analytics provider for that matter. A lot of them, they, they will come back and say, Hey, I'm going to need some additional time. I'm going to need to create a work or it's come back to site and fix these problems. And unfortunately, in a lot of cases, we didn't have a leg to stand on at that point.
There, there wasn't anything to say that, if switch gives you an insight or any Alex provider gives you an insight, that they need to respond to it. And this was a big problem. And what it, what it really highlighted was that we needed to clearly define what was to be included as part of scheduled maintenance moving forward.
And then what was an actual task of which, could genuinely create a work order for, so we went through [00:31:00] carefully define those things.
Bryce Anderson: Yeah. Tom, I just want to jump in there that, we're joking about the letter thing, wrap it in the BMEs company to. Um, when they press preventative maintenance, they don't tend to, they don't allow to go to the VAV boxes cause there's a thousand of them.
Right. So they don't go to them the letter. So there are situations where you know, that the event comes in, go look at the vid box. It's pretty reasonable. However, they did have an allowance actually in the contract to go onto the floors up a letter to the ceiling out. So what if, what if I make here is that a lot of the times?
Um, so like some of the times the BMS company has just been difficult and we have a lot of examples of that, but they all, a lot of situations where there just, isn't a clear understanding between the analytics providers, um, engineer, who's managing the managed service. Who's running those meetings. They might not clearly understand exactly how BMS companies are engaged.
What they contract say and what they're supposed to do. Um, and [00:32:00] again, and as Tom said that the big issue was that, the only piece of paper that the owner can go back to, to reference in a dispute is the BMS companies, um, maintenance
Tom Balme: proposal, which
Bryce Anderson: is obviously written for their advantage.
Nothing's a bad thing it's written like that that's fair enough. Right? Um, we're now when you have the spec, the specs black and white, that's what you got to do. So the owner can go back, pull this back out. Page 10. Sorry guys. You got to do that. Um, the other thing was, that was interesting is that. Um, traditionally what consultants try and do it for to resolve this is they try and list out all of the stuff that is now included.
So you kind of listen, you say, okay, you've got to go and check all these things and you can never list out everything. It's a three page list of stuff to go that that's now included. The problem is you can never actually get that whole list accurate. And when we, when we built our spec, um, we actually had cut down.
My [00:33:00] previous book was cut down to a more simple version for amp, cause it had to be simple. Right? And I said to Tom, look, let's not try and define exactly what you will do, what you won't do. Let's rather say how many hours you spend on that and how many hours you spend on that. So our very first basic version, just to dumb it down for the, for this discussion here, we said from now on, in rough terms, when the technician comes to socks, the first half of the day, Everything you do is for free.
The first half that I can make you do anything for analytics. If you gotta go choose something, you're gonna make a slot software change. If you go to rebuild some points in the graphic, do some something, whatever comes out of that machine is not chargeable. Unless you go to buy something, go to buy an actuator.
That's chargeable to buy a sensor that's chargeable, but labor hours, first half the day, anything goes have lunch. Second half the day. Now the key here was to be fair, right? The second [00:34:00] half that I was on the second all day, you do whatever you want to do. Go do all your preventative maintenance tasks that are important to you.
Backing up databases, network, integrity, checks, checking the antivirus, whatever it is because we had to be fair. I couldn't just say from now on you just look at the analytics because annex doesn't do everything. So there was a, uh, an approach to around let's find something that's that's, um, fair to everyone.
Still focused on things that you have to do your core stuff, go and do preventative maintenance on stuff that annex con check those dampers there. We can't check them. You go check them. So there's, that was a key sort of thought process around the current way, how we specifying it, isn't working. It's hard to measure.
I imagine it now is very easy. How many hours are you on switch? How many hours are you on? Preventative maintenance is very easy to measure. And then we said, so we did that and we workshopped it with amp and like, does this work as it going to work? We, we spoke to the industry and I said, if I had some courses, if I did this, how would you react?
We had to either [00:35:00] sort of discussions with BNS companies. They're not what we did was you said, hold on a sec, it's a bit disjointed to do four hours, four hours, four hours, four hours. So it basically comes around to half of your time. Half of your labor hours are allocated to awesome. The other half is traditional work.
So if we got a big problem with the analytics and we need two days, go spend two days, redo that code, rebuild the database, fix that thing, work back those days, catch them up somewhere else. So I said an extreme example. You can do six months of high value maintenance and you can do six months of, core, preventative type of stuff.
But the key here is that again, the point from making is you have to resolve the actual roadblock with a solution. You can't just say, I want you to be better.
James Dice: Totally. I want to circle back also on something you said earlier, Bryce, about how, what you [00:36:00] found was that. Well, I want to talk, I want to talk about how these three things can get stacked up from a pricing standpoint. So you have an initial maintenance contract. You then come in with analytics and I'm making some hand gestures for those of you that are just on audio right now.
So you have this contract for maintenance annual contract. You now have this stacked on top of it, an annual analytics software costs, right. And then also you're then potentially having an, a, these pull through these work orders that are basically like, okay, you want us to work with the analytics provider?
We're going to charge you extra for that. So I'm viewing that as like, what I'm hearing from you guys is that's like the worst case scenario right now where you, you basically have. Silos, essentially you have your maintenance site low and you have your analytics, software silo, and the owner is essentially being charged twice potentially, or being charged very inefficiently for those two things.
When what you guys are [00:37:00] talking about as a way to integrate them together, is that kind
Bryce Anderson: of what I'm hearing? Let me expand on that. Cause, um, it's, it's, um, even more interesting than that. So you're competing your rights as to before there's, there's the, the chunk of money for the technician to come to slot in additional investment for technology and another investment to go and fix those things.
That's right. This is the part that I find most interesting. I think BMS companies probably originally five to 10 years ago when they developed their own incumbent technology platforms, they probably intended it for it to be the way it's supposed to be. However it happened when it went to market. In my personal opinion, my experiences that's how the game was played.
So BMS company would say, you want a biotechnology it's extra. I mean, now, because they did that, they made it cost prohibitive and owners didn't take it up. That's why in the start, this wasn't going everywhere. So [00:38:00] BNS companies, because they didn't, they, because they developed a tool, but didn't restructure their whole process.
They didn't do that. They created this market for cloud based technologies. They created that market and that's when, then owners were getting annoyed and they were going to third-party companies to do this. Like if BMS companies did the right thing, 10 years ago, every single building in the world right now would have analytics by the incumbent business provider.
There'd be no market for third-party cloud technology. There'd be no market for it. They created that market. Know, like a little bit greedy maybe and they got bitten. The problem is this. This is the big problem. Now is that in the last 12 months, when I'm reviewing tenders, I've noticed that BMS companies on no lo no longer charging, very high subscription services for analytics anymore.[00:39:00]
Sometimes you're being tennis bought years ago, they were putting in like, 30, 40,000 Australian dollars a year subscription service for analytics and keeping the same, a hundred grand there. They've gotten burned by that now because somebody else now has taken a piece of their market cloud-based companies.
And they've realized that they shot themselves in the foot. So now I'm noticing the last 12 months they are now restructuring. Like they should have 10 years ago, and it's now becoming more attractive. I have a feeling that the way it's going, and I'm just going to put this out there. I could be wrong.
It's a very good chance that. The market for third-party cloud analytics might disappear because if I'm sitting here and I'm going a building, I'm going to be in this company. And that is saying, look, you're paying a hundred grand preventative maintenance. We want to integrate our technology into our maintenance contracts.
We're going to absorb that cost. So you have to pay any extra, but you're gonna get the technology and I'll [00:40:00] tell you what I'm gonna do for the first three months. I'll actually use my service maintenance hours to engineer the whole thing. So I'm, I'm gonna apologize up front. You're not going to see my tech for three months.
I'm gonna use those that money to engineer the thing, absorbed the subscription service and restructure my thing. Once the BMS companies realize that, which is not rocket science, why would you go to a third-party company and pay them $20,000 a year? Why would you do that? So, yeah, that's a pretty interesting thing.
It's almost like we might come in a full circle, but the luckily for the technology companies, the BMS companies are not that organized. So for them to actually like, we could make them do it. Like if amp came to me, I couldn't say, oh, you expect to force that to happen. You don't need, you don't need switch automation.
Right. That's not what their vision was. It wasn't their technology roadmap that we're building towards. But, um, is a thing that's going to happen there. I think. Yeah. I mean,
James Dice: I would challenge you a little [00:41:00] bit and say that the products that most of the big BMS companies have are not up to par from a. FDD standpoint compared to a lot of,
Bryce Anderson: yeah, I agree.
Now the, um, the specialists are building a tool that they're specialists in and they have resources every day, refining and making a single beautiful, right. The BMS company, it's a bit of a, an extra bolt on to their service. So you are correct, but there's a thing that can easily be fixed. That can be fixed.
That is not fixing it. Totally. No, you are right. If you like, it's better to have a dedicated company with dedicated resources focusing on Guinness, right. At the BMEs company focus on their strengths. So yeah, I do agree with what you're saying. I'm just saying that there is a route off this whole thing to get, go, to do a circle.
It would require it would require what you're saying
James Dice: is it require process transformation, not just a product,
Bryce Anderson: a hundred [00:42:00] percent. I'm just working on a maintenance restructure right now, do your yesterday. And the client's telling me that for the last two years, the BMS company, it's their incumbent, um, analytics, they're paying extra for it.
He says those for the techs are not even looking at it because no one, no one has integrated the service technician and train them. This is now what you have to do. Stop walking around and looking for broken things. So they're setting the right thing and they got the wrong product, but they didn't tell the guy with the safety boots on or the goal of the safety boots on that's different now.
Just one more thing. I was really just getting an idea there. Other, a massive hospital a few years ago with multiple buildings and we sat there and I said, listen to the beat of the cabinet. It wasn't. Yeah, this is how it's going to happen. And the account manager stayed with the BMS. He said, I really love what you're doing there.
He has a great idea. But as for the technician, is he coming here are days a week for 20 years. I [00:43:00] don't think that he will change. I don't think how's that. Did you think that, did you say that? I just heard you say that might be true, but don't tell them me and the customer that this whole thing can't work because your tech doesn't want to do it anyway.
That's it fascinating,
James Dice: Tom, I'd love to hear your reaction to that from the owner standpoint. Right? So the reason I'm asking this. Is for all the other owners, right. That out there right now that have a portfolio and they have service contracts, diverse service contracts, they're hiring third-party analytics.
How would you recommend that they structure, what should they expect from a pricing standpoint? Um, and these contracts?
Tom Balme: Well, I mean, for, for most owners out there that, invest in third party analytics, they're, they're probably getting some really great outcomes from that analytics, they're definitely getting things such as, energy efficiency, [00:44:00] reductions, they're likely getting thermal comfort improvements and they're likely getting, uh, increased asset life cycles and equipment, life cycles, by fixing things better and sooner and quicker, what they're probably not getting is actually.
Better value form their existing service contracts and that shift over to, to data driven maintenance. And certainly when we went through and we reviewed our own service contracts and we had a look at, just the, I think what we've been speaking about here when we were, when we had a look Hertz, we went through our existing contracts and we saw that, largely, even at sites where we had an incumbent, um, uh, an analytics solution was that, effectively that plan prevented maintenance costs was not being reduced.
Um, and simply these investments in these technologies, weren't actually stripping back the need for planned preventative maintenance. It was [00:45:00] simply just being added on top as an additional cost. And so what I'm saying to, I suppose, to other owners is that there's an opportunity here to say generally, The, uh, technology now has been out for well over 10 years is that there is a better way to get more value out of your existing service contracts.
And we believe that we've, we've found a way to do it. And certainly some of the outcomes that we'll discuss later, I think we're showing that we've seen an uptick, uh, in these outcomes, but there's certainly, there's certainly, uh, I think there's perception was out there in the market, this investment in these analytics technologies, remote monitoring tools, energy management systems, we're going to strip away the need and the cost of planned preventative maintenance.
But in reality, when we went through the numbers, we saw that that plan, preventative maintenance scope wasn't being reduced and all this investment in technologies was just increasing the cost of BMS maintenance each. [00:46:00] And then when we were installing these technologies, you then need to actually have more maintenance to service, more sensors, to then service, more metering, uh, and costs were actually spiraling out of control.
And I think from the analytics company's perspective, it's some of these costs that typically they don't capture, right? They'll, they'll, they'll typically come along and say, Hey, pay us 20 grand. And we'll save you 20 grand of energy. This year it'll be a cost neutral service. But what they don't realize is that the client has probably spent $10,000 that year.
In reactive work orders to get the BMS contractors, to close out these tasks. Those costs never, ever captured by the analytics platform, but as a client is certainly hits our profit and loss.
Bryce Anderson: And
James Dice: with that further though, real quick, a lot of the analytics providers will also try to claim maintenance savings in their ROI calculation as well.
And that's only going to happen, right? If you're actually making sure [00:47:00] that those dollars are being saved, like you guys are.
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Tom Balme: Absolutely analytics providers, well, if you look in the, if you look in the pitch deck sales deck of any analytics solution, you'll see somewhere in there, it'll say something along the lines of streamlined maintenance or maintenance efficiencies, something along those lines.
In reality, those efficiencies are not being delivered. [00:48:00] Simply raising a bunch of faults each month, isn't going to actually reduce maintenance or streamline maintenance. What it is often doing is just adding time and adding costs to our existing maintenance contracts, because there's nothing in our existing contracts that says, guys, we need to collaborate.
We need to define what's chargeable and what's not chargeable. And is there an opportunity to actually reduce the cost of this contract? And this is where this is where, we, we realize and we'd analyze, 35 plus bills. And, over the span of, the past five years, our BMS maintenance contract costs had just gone up and up and up.
Uh, and we didn't have any control over that. Yeah.
Bryce Anderson: Can I just jump in quickly tell them I was just listening to sign there. And, um, one of the failures of my product for the last five years was that I could issue the specification and I could generate collaboration and I could, um, I could change how companies do things, but what I could [00:49:00] never do was it's get the process to be the right price.
What happened is the BMS company still has enough room to make up whatever price they want. You know what I mean? Like you say, you have to collaborate. Well, what does that mean? Is that $10,000 or $50,000? And they might say, well, we're going to go into chiller plant room and we're gonna do one day of maintenance per year in the chiller plant room.
But somebody else says we're gonna do three days a year in the chiller plant room. So what our been struggling with the last five years before the amp thing. I had no control over what the, what it would cost. It could cost anything like anything. It could be a hundred thousand dollars. It could be $10,000.
It could be $10,000, whatever they want it to be. That's what it could be. So when we started this journey, I was sitting there thinking, man, if these guys are going to pay me to build this thing and I write up all the scope and all the pricing comes back and the pricing across the portfolio goes up 50%.
I'm not going to be very popular. Probably won't be on this podcast right now. Um, [00:50:00] so my biggest stress was how do we do this thing? Get the collaboration to get a handle on solving this problem that the preventative maintenance costing must come down a little bit to try not to set the technology. And I was sitting there and how I normally do it is I normally just keep negotiating three or four times until we get.
We meet halfway, but I knew, as I said before, that was, was not gonna be possible on the scale of it. So I sat there and I, I said to Tom and Daniel, I said, listen, here, we have to tell them what the maintenance costs. That was a very stressful thing for me. We need to come up with a system or, or a process or a formula for every building that we tell them, this building needs one day a week maintenance.
And that's going to line up with the collaboration piece and preventative maintenance, all sorts of things. This building [00:51:00] needs one day a month. That was very stressful for me because to go to a VMs company, who's had free rein to do whatever price and they want for 100 years and now say, Hey, I'm going to tell you what, how much it costs.
So, yeah, I was super stressed, but what I'm going to say here was that again, is a situation where if you want to get a handle on that process, And you want to try and massage it so that it's reasonable and it's in line with the way digitize and maintenance. You have to tell them what to do, what it costs.
So, yeah, that was so I was like, when, when the tennis came through, I was like, oh my God, like, please let us work. Um, and we, we got it right. We just, we got it rots. It was balanced. The contractors. Weren't, it's a funny Strom to try and use appropriate language. But the way I described as Brittany was we need to the BMS companies to be a [00:52:00] little bit unhappy, but not angry that they're going to dig their heels in.
We had to try and get this to a point that they understand. They don't love it, but they know it's the way we ask you that, that number, that balance had to be right. Otherwise they would just dig the heels and say, I'm not doing nothing. It's a proprietary system. You have no options. You could know where to go.
We won't do it. So. To get what we've been talking about here for the last 10 minutes around, because we're not checking everything in 12 months, we need that piece. Um, so be brave,
James Dice: maybe back up a little, just a second. So there's the, the combining the two costs together. You want to make that efficient, but I think what you're also hitting on here, Bryce is the fact that when you guys looked across the amp portfolio, you had that randomness that you talked about earlier, and you had some prices, some BMS, it wasn't just analytics are not integrated into these processes.
There was also just some [00:53:00] prices that were astronomical. I mean, I think you, you guys showed me the spreadsheet. We can't publish it. There were some that were two to three times what others were on a hour by hour or per square foot basis. The way I understand it. So we're talking about basically, it's not just creating a spec and a standard for how maintenance is done.
You guys also created a, like a standard for the pricing aspect
Bryce Anderson: of this. Yeah, that's what I've said in the start. I said that imp now has a baseline for what maintenance costs. That's what I meant when I said that if they build a brand new, new construction job right now out of the ground, and it's 50,000 square meters and it's this, this and this, we know what's going to cost right now.
And we got, when we get pricing, we know what's fair and reasonable. Cause we've, we've done the hard work to, to rationalize all of it. I want to just expand on one thing here. Um, because people might think that BMS companies are ripping their customers off and they're. A little bit maybe, but this is what's happening, right?
When you're doing heavy, new construction, [00:54:00] construction departments of BMS companies have a very good idea of what the market value is to build this new site, because they're continually tested in the tender phase. They know that this is a million-dollar BMS installed. They know that the in-service departments don't have that experience.
So the account manager who's putting together your price of a hundred thousand Australian dollars a year for maintenance, that account manager with no disrespect, four years ago, as a service technician. And two years before that was a, an electrician or a mechanical tech or whatever they were, they've worked this company, they don't, they don't know what the market value is.
And haven't worked for lots of other companies, but what happens is people like me and Tom and the amp ops managers and facility managers that have been around for 20 or 30 years have worked on four or five different buildings. They have a good idea of what. Value for money, it looks like. So I think sometimes a BMS, a cabinet just follows their process, puts the fee in and [00:55:00] we all start hating on them.
Not because they're trying to rip us off. It's just that they don't know what other companies are charging. That's those spreadsheets we looked at before. We can look at that it's it's particular companies. I'm not going to be more descriptive in that there are particular companies that are consistently dramatically more expensive than other companies.
And it just means that, these companies are still processing maintenance the same way they did in 2001, they haven't realized that the market is changing. So I really want to make it very clear to all your listening here at BMS companies, get a bad rep all the time. And a lot of the time there's actually a reason why that is.
That's why it is. So I'll sometimes have owners come to me and say, bras. We also unhappy that BMS company find us a way out. We upgrade the thing or we, we get who are their agents [00:56:00] who can maintain a systems. The same, every time I go to be in his company, I said, listen, yet, the customer is very unhappy with you.
What are you guys doing? Nelson? This is what they say. We talked about. We're doing exactly what our preventative maintenance contract says we should do. As far as we're concerned, we're in a great job. It's just that the, this companies are not aligned with what the owners want or what the market demands, which is very different to, I was a service technician in London, 2002, 2003, 2004.
All I had to do to be a superhero service technician was get to sot on Tom sonnet at the keys, say hello to the facility manager, look busy for six hours. on Tom and issue my report because in those days we didn't have electric meters. We didn't have integrations. We didn't care at all about energy efficiency.
And that was [00:57:00] important. Comfort control. That's comfortable. You did a good job that is no longer acceptable nowadays. However, that preventative maintenance contract, if you read it and you read one from the same company, 10, 15, 20 years ago, it's the same document. It just has some more beautiful pictures, a bit more marketing about AI, ML, awesomeness, energy efficiency.
It's those words that are in there, but the actual, what they're actually doing, hasn't really changed.
Tom Balme: Yeah. I mean, just to jump in now, I mean, when we reviewed our existing BMS maintenance contracts, even some of the so-called data-driven maintenance contracts that we had, it would be a 40 page document of which 39 and a half pages in it describing.
Plan preventative maintenance and a preventive maintenance schedule. These are the tasks that we're going to do each month. Each time we come to site and then there'd be half a page, a couple of paragraphs about, we also [00:58:00] have a analytics platform, which we're going to deploy on the site and we'll use it.
And that was the extent of the scope that would be described in these contracts. So we, realize that really the plan per preventive maintenance scope just wasn't reducing down. And it just hadn't evolved along with the technology. And that this was certainly part of the frustration when we spoke with some of the ops managers on sites, is that, they say that their BMS technician rocks up to site and they know they come to site and they know that they're doing things out there in the field, but they have no idea what those things are.
And they're probably doing good. We just don't know what it is. Oh, absolutely. They could be good things. They could be. Um, they're probably doing exactly what they said that they would be doing in their, in their contracts, but often this wasn't being reported back. Uh, they're not chairing meetings with, um, with the key stakeholders, uh, and doing all the things that, third party, independent analytics [00:59:00] vendors are really, really good at, which is communicating the value of their.
To their client. And that's, that's certainly, I think where there's, there's a gap currently with incumbent vendors is that it's not that, their, their technologies, their analytics technologies are bad. It's probably probably very similar, fault detection rules, in the income and BMS contractors platforms, the probably the same or very similar rules that are out there in some of the market leading platforms.
Um, however, they're just not using it to their full benefit. And importantly, they're not communicating the value of what they're doing back to amp. So when we questioned question, these guys and said, Hey, like, we've been paying for this for the past three years. Can you show us what you've done out of it?
There was just blank faces. There was nothing that I was just like, oh, yeah. We've been logging into the tool and it's like, well, you've never given us one report. You've never told us, Hey, this is what we picked up. And this is the problems that we solved. It was all just assumed that this was [01:00:00] done.
And then of course, when, when we deployed switch and they were picking up all these additional faults, it was clear that obviously they hadn't been doing these things or importantly, that they hadn't actually reported this stuff back to us. If you don't communicate your value back to the client, that's almost just as bad as not doing it.
Bryce Anderson: Yeah.
James Dice: But so if I can summarize the state of like, when you guys did this study across the whole portfolio, there was non-competitive pricing. You didn't really have like a report back on the results you were getting, the scopes weren't the same. You had different definitions of what extra was extra costs were.
So can you guys talk about like what you did like briefly talk about? Okay. Given that initial scenario, these are the things that we did. Like if I'm, if I'm an owner saying I want to get my stuff under control, like you guys have, what is the roadmap for the, these, these maintenance contracts? [01:01:00]
Tom Balme: The first step, um, is to.
Do is find out what you've currently got in your portfolio and to create an understanding a baseline of your existing maintenance contracts. And when, when we went through this exercise with Bryce, we were just like, what key metrics can we analyze to determine how much we're paying, whether we're getting value for the money and whether we're getting good service.
So we took a look at probably three things. The first of all was, what is the price of the existing service contracts? And then we took a look at how many days maintenance are we getting for that price. So
Bryce Anderson: I've been quickly. I clock you quiet on that one. What happens is that what we also found is that with across the portfolio, we didn't always know how often the texts were coming to site because what's happened recently is that some of the smarter BMS companies have on note or refusing to tell us how many days the tech comes to site.
I've been a lot of meetings. And [01:02:00] the venous company says this is 150,000 Australian dollars a year maintenance, I'll say, okay, fine. I said, how often does the tech come to site? Well, we don't do maintenance like that anymore. It's all digitized. It's this. And it's that. And I say, but hold on a sec, is it one day a week, one day a month, one day a year.
Can't tell you that that's not how it was on how we do work anymore. So one of the issues we had was we just, we knew what it costs, but we didn't know when to expect the person to come. And that was also a reason why we wanted that thing way. We will tell you how often come to site, rather than that, you determine what that was.
Sorry, Tom, I've been distracted. You too much.
Tom Balme: They had no, no, no.
Yeah, no. I mean, that's, that's an incredibly valid point. Um, at a lot of sites we would ask the FM. I would ask the company how many times the technician would come to site and often we get an answer and then later down the line, when we dug into it, the answer was wrong or it just wasn't. Right. Um, they thought they were getting someone in.
One day a week, turns out they're only [01:03:00] coming 36 days a year or, twice a month. And there was a complete disconnect between what we even thought we were getting and what we were actually getting. And so, getting to the bottom of that, wasn't easy, but eventually, we found, roughly how many days maintenance we thought we were getting at each site.
And then we took a look at, what's, what's the size of the building and what's the content of HVAC and BMS in there, which was again, another really hard tasks. And I think typically when you ask a BMS company, you how do you price them as maintenance is, they'll say, we'll take a look at the number of devices.
We'll take a look at the number of points and then we'll come up with a plan that will then surface that concept of BMS. And then when we asked our contractors, okay, can you provide us with a points? This, can you tell us how many hardware and software points are in each of the buildings. We got some wild answers back, some tiny buildings that apparently had, like tens of thousands of hardware boards, [01:04:00] which clearly wasn't true.
They were just mixing up hardware and software points. So in reality, we didn't actually know, just how many devices and just how many points needed to be serviced. And so we needed to find a way to standardize and create a baseline based off, some key metric and what we ended up landing on was the square meterage of the building.
We could take a look at the square meterage of the building, the number of days maintenance that, uh, we weren't getting with what we were getting and then the price of that maintenance. And then that gave us a really good idea to understand, okay, how many suppose in a dollar per day or a dollar per hour metric, how much are we currently paying 10?
And we analyze that across the whole portfolio. And that's where the sort of wildness. Came up where we saw that, we were getting the same amount of days maintenance and the technicians time for two, three times the price at certain sites that had the exact same square meter region, probably a very similar number of
Bryce Anderson: points.
[01:05:00] Yeah. Look at it. Wasn't quite as simple as that, um, not to get into like the nuts and bolts, but originally the plan was to come with a simple formula that the size of the building and meters squared, you know, got us the answer. But when I first started formulating that ad and then cross-referencing the numbers that were spitting out against is my experience of doing this.
It didn't quite work as simple as that because when you have a, a 20 story building and it goes to 30 stories, sometimes you still got three chillers. They're just much bigger chillers or the air has just much bigger air handier. So it, it, wasn't always that a bonus double the size is double the cost.
And also, for example, if you had an extra 20, 30 floors of VAVs, we don't check them physically applied in the ceiling. We don't do that. So. If I spend days and days, Tom has noticed looking at this, this formula and this relationship and thinking like, Hey, but that doesn't quite work. So I basically just cleaned the sheet because originally tried to do it with points that was never going work.
Uh, as [01:06:00] Tom said, we went in the wrong numbers. People don't know how many points there are, but, um, then I just got, got it down. I've just built a spreadsheet, every 5,000 square meters. And I just thought to think about, okay, from the jobs I've worked on these SaaS buildings, what feels right? So it's not a straight curve that, as the building gets bigger, it gets more expensive.
It does shift a bit. And, and also the thing is once the building got smallish, there was still fundamental tasks that had to be done, even though it's a small building. So small buildings, the cost per square meter is quite high. But you've still got to do all those tasks, but a small building. So it works out that small buildings can sometimes, dollar per square meter or whatever it is can be more expensive than big buildings.
But I think circling back to your original question, cause we had digressed slightly. Yeah. Like if you're the owner and what you want to do. So the first thing that Thomas talked through there was you've got to understand your existing portfolio in the building and what is it? But [01:07:00] the one thing that I think was we spoke a bit about, the collaboration piece and we spoke about the specification and so that accountability to a process, a document.
The other thing we did was, um, Because I basically ran this exactly as if it was a construction project. I had, I wrote a return brief, we had specifications, there was tenders. I did the same process end to end that I would normally do. And in a, in a, in a normal project, you have a tender form.
The contractor fills in the costs for materials, installation, commissioning, project management, blah, blah, blah. So we'd create a tender form. And this tend to form, which is a word doc that they like to fill in. So there's, their proposal comes back into the tend to form that comes back and they have to onset exact questions that we're putting in the end, we created this kind of transparency and processing was that, that to fill-in the cost breakup of what maintenance costs.
And because we told them how many days you want you to be. [01:08:00] We had complete transparency on the technician's cost. So all we had to do then was find out, we know what the technician, I mean, days we know exactly if he dies at all and there's a cost for that. What are the other costs that we can't see?
Cause the issue with BMS maintenance or any services, maintenance, any, any system, security, anything lifts is that we don't know what the breakup of the cost is. We created those, those tend to forms. So now we know what is, so if your BMS system has a subscription service, which some do, what does that number?
And this is when it got very interesting because, and I'll give you an exact example. I wrote a few numbers down this morning when I was getting ready for this. Um, so we, this isn't real numbers from a, from a 10 to four that was filled out for a particular slot, someone Australia. So we had 87, we had a 87,000 Australian dollars.
So $87,000 is the technician. And because these are existing sites that had existing numbers [01:09:00] already. BMS companies were trying to fill in the hidden money in one of my breakup points because they had nowhere to hide money. Now you couldn't hide the money anyway, so the form says this, it says 87,000 for the technician with boots on coming to site, doing hard work 28,000 for the account manager and 10,000 for administration costs.
And Tom and I were sitting in these meet negotiation meetings. We were saying, hold a sec. You're telling me that for $125,000 a year maintenance, 30% of that cost is administration. And it was because they had no way to harvest money anymore before the process could be anything they want it to be. Now, the process has to line up in the cost breakup in the tender forms, they're all filling in and it was so bad, a little bit embarrassing.
And, um, they were giving us all sorts of answers about how they could justify 30% of the cost is [01:10:00] administration costs. We were saying like, so we had a few heavy, heavy meetings to get that straightened out. And that's also how we achieved, how we forced the preventative maintenance cost to be reasonable because resolve these problems.
We had sites that were charging. They put $6,000 for parking and they're coming to site one day a week. That's about $120 or $115 for parking. The parking is $20 and we're like, Hey, to say, how do, how are you charging us? Five times the prosper pocket, because the problem was they had nowhere to hide the money anymore.
So that's why, when I say to you, we have now amp has developed a base of what maintenance costs and what the cost breakups are for account management, administration, Hawking, full function, fire tests generated, we know what this whole thing is. Now. There's no more smoke and mirrors. Now. That's not, it's a bit unfair to BMS company.
And I felt very sorry for them. And I used to apologize all [01:11:00] the time, but we can't keep doing this the same way we've been doing it. This isn't we have to change. Um, anyway, so yeah, I guess there's a lot of things I've got to do, but the thing is that BMS companies, they have answers for everything. You need somebody.
Can counteract those answers. You know what I mean? He, a specialist person that knows exactly what question to ask. I'll give you another quick point. This is a bit of a soft story here, but what a, in a tender, a lot of BMS companies saw as an opportunity to try and get more sites. So some companies are saying to us, Hey, look, we can maintain five sites, not just our one site.
We support all these different systems. We support these different systems. They were telling us this. And I was like, that doesn't sound right there. So I'm pretty sure I know what system you install. So Tom and I would have these meetings with them and we'd sit in a meeting and they say, they do a PowerPoint and say, should we support all these sites?
We can maintain these, these BMS systems. And then now to say, okay, hang on a sec. So if that controller that [01:12:00] easy IO multi-vendor controller fails, what are you going to do about it? Are we going to replace with our own controller? So at the end of the discussion, none of the sites they were saying they could maintain.
They could actually maintain. So there's a lot of, you know, I mean, there's, there's holes everywhere. That'd be plugged. We can't in this discussion list at, this is what you have to do because it's a minefield and it is what it is because it's hard to fix. It's very hard to fix. Um, this isn't something that Toms would be forced to expand on.
You know, We were saying about this discussion around, it costs us money and it's it's extra, or the analytics with the incumbent. I remember the very first time I ever discovered this, I was in a meeting with the, with the, with the customer and the BMEs company. And they were putting in pricing for analytics.
So they were saying it's $50,000 a year for the maintenance. And instead it came, we're going to charge you $20,000 a year for the analytics. Now, I guess I said, hang on a sec. I said, why is it not [01:13:00] built in why not reducing it? Mightn't they say to me, no Nebraska, you understand we're providing analytics, not to offset man hours.
We're blind analytics to find faults quicker, which is true as well. Right? So the thing is that you've got to be armed with the knowledge to shut down all those, those points. You know what I mean? Yeah, and it wasn't easy. Like we spent six months to make this happen.
James Dice: Yeah. I mean, analytics providers can, can get into these meetings as well and hit these roadblocks and not know what to do either.
I've seen it a hundred times where the roadblocks aren't necessarily real to getting these things implemented, but you just have to be able to have the bigger stick or the right, right. Answer to the argument, that kind of thing. Okay. So, um, we're, we're, we're painting our roadmap here. We've just talked about how to restructure [01:14:00] the process for procuring maintenance contracts.
Right. Um, so we talked about pricing, we talked about the spec, we talked about scoping, um, Let's let's kind of shift. Cause I think that's a good set of best practices. Uh, people can call Bryce if they need more help than that. Um, let's shift to how analytics providers and BMS contractors can work together better, um, in this new world of data-driven maintenance or analytics-based maintenance, whatever.
So let's just kind of maybe spend a few minutes and talk about best practices that you guys have learned that you think are important for the general
Bryce Anderson: marketplace. Yeah. Well, the thing is they, they will work together quite well. Genuinely at BMS service technician just wants to please his customer.
Cause they're not that worried about money. Right? So, um, once you do all the stuff you've spoken about, once it's all restructured and the [01:15:00] service technician knows that when it comes to. The first thing you got to do is make a cup of coffee and then log into the workflow management tool and see what's assigned to him.
They will actually work together quite well. Um, I'm not sure that there's, I don't think about it. I'm not sure there's a long list of best practices. As a matter of once you've set up the process to work, everyone's signed up. I think it's going to work. Like we'll obviously find out the next 12 months as we've done this.
Cause this is just start in January sort of thing. We'll see how it comes out of the wash. But, um, I think that if you do the hard work upfront and it's very clear and it's documented it'll happen, the mistake that people probably make is they probably say, look, let's get the technology company on room.
I think that's coming a room. Let's talk about it. And that's what often happens in existing buildings is there's not necessarily a consultant, always that does the stuff that's when it doesn't work. Um, but yeah, any, any. Like, how do we get them to work better? I think that, yeah. I just think that you just got to get the stick out.
Right. And then once it's arranged, everyone is actually [01:16:00] happy at the end.
Tom Balme: Yeah. I, I think, that that previous battleground of, your, your contractors, planned preventative maintenance deliverables versus the analytics vendor, fighting for their time, how much do they do they spend on, with each person it's not easy for BMS technicians when they rock up to site.
Right. They, they fax, we have three bosses, they have their actual boss and their contracted deliverables. They have an FM who's going to give them a few things to do and is effectively their client. Then you've also got the analytics vendor. Who's going to give them faults and tasks and things to fix.
So the best practice is to clearly define how much time they should spend. With each of those components. So I think the first step of the way w w w we've got here is just to say, let's start at 50 50. So we want the first half of your day to be spent doing data during maintenance. And it's a clear line in the sand that a technician knows exactly how much time they [01:17:00] have to dedicate to Dodger and maintenance.
I think what will come out in the wash is we might find that maybe it needs to be 60, 70% at some sites, or maybe it needs to be less. Maybe it needs to be 40, 30%, but as a concept, we had to start somewhere. And that seemed like a logical starting point. So I think providing that clarity to the technician to say, Hey, this is how much time we wanted to dedicate towards this really helped facilitate that collaboration in that occasion.
I think this has been probably the fallacy of analytics companies previously is that they've just tried to describe all of the wonderful outputs and reports and dashboards and faults and insights that they were going to jail. And it was just assume that the technician would understand how to take those insights and then actually do that and then actually deliver an out an outcome with them.
What, what that means is that each technician at each site had to almost become a super user of these platforms. Of course, they don't get trained in EV like every single one of these platforms. I mean, there's tens, if not hundreds of these platforms out there [01:18:00] in the world is a technician supposed to become a super user in all of these.
And then a technician would come on a site, get maybe really good after a few months learning how to use that tool. And then they'd get moved to another site and you get a new technician and all of a sudden you're starting from scratch. And so that really prescriptive approach doesn't necessarily work at scale across a large portfolio.
So I think that's where the 50 50 time split really helps simplify it down to say, we know that we're going to get really. Insights out of an analytics platform, there's going to be faults is going to be wonderful. Grass is going to be wonderful data. There's wonderful reports that the technician can use.
Just give an allocation of your time towards that. And then you've still got the second half of the day left over. If your plan preventive maintenance needs that also have your boss and your FM. So that's immediate is probably best practice. Just allowing a clear amount of time in the technician's day to do
Bryce Anderson: the analytics.
The other thing I was just trying [01:19:00] to think through the, as you're talking to Tom, is that, um, we, I know these companies have to get away from this thing where they're beating up the BMEs company. Yeah. The service technician is very defensive, like stuff. These guys, I mean, I'm working, I'm working hard.
You have, you have a five years, 10 years and you're spitting out all this stuff you don't understand. So it has to be a point where the, the, the analytics company needs to understand how to best communicate with the BMS company because BMS companies are defending themselves. A lot of times collaborating and working with you, they are defending themselves from being attacked because they're being accused of being poor performance.
So I think that the technology companies can, can take that and try and think about how can they better approach this because you need the BMS company to be on your team. And part
James Dice: of that is, uh, just like as what happened here at amp BMS contractors, BMS companies wanted the analytics contracts, [01:20:00] right?
They were the ones that were trying to compete for that like portfolio wide contract. They lost to an independent third party technology provider. So I think it's, it's incumbent on the BMS providers to, to let that go and play nice to this new paradigm
Bryce Anderson: that we're having, but they need to be educated as well.
You're off, it's not just on one side. The BMS company used to learn, to let that go. Yeah, the wilderness changed. This technology exists. It's not going to go away probably. So they need to adjust that and be more productive, like in the spec, there's like a one line and it says that the BMS company will interact with the technology platform as if it was their own platform.
You do embrace it as if it was your own platform.
James Dice: Totally. So you guys also had, you were telling me last time we talked about this, you're, you're baking KPIs into the maintenance contracts as well. That's incentivize, or at least nudge the contractor towards [01:21:00] data-driven maintenance versus the old way of basically telling them here's what I want you to hit in terms of the numbers.
Can you talk
Bryce Anderson: more
Tom Balme: about that? Yeah. W when, when we were coming up with, with, with KPIs of how do we measure the success of this moving forward? So how do we, how do we be fair and how do we measure success? And. I think traditionally with analytics companies, there's always been this massive focus on energy reduction.
If you invest in analytics, we will find faults that will save you energy and optimize the building. And what would happen here is that you broke up to these meetings and the analytics company would be putting forward these quite complex energy saving folds, because that was what was going to make them look the best to their client.
But potentially I think probably negating the fact that there might've been all these other wonderful things, maybe not big in their minds, but you know, big in terms of the contracts and how it makes them [01:22:00] look good to say, Hey, there's actually a bunch of, faults that will actually need to be addressed as part of this as, as part of your day.
So what we wanted to do was kind of a way of saying let's let's decouple analytics and vendor KPIs away from, from. And let's focus on just two things. And those two things are closing out as many data-driven maintenance tasks as possible within the scheduled time and engagement and collaboration. And if we focus on those two things, we know that all of those other things are going to be delivered.
So we will save energy, we will improve them or comfort. We will increase. Um, we will increase the lifecycle of the, uh, of the equipment. And it's really those two key things that we're tracking. So we're just looking at how many times people are logging into the platform. How many comments are they making?
Uh, and how many data during maintenance tasks are they closing out each month? [01:23:00] So it's, it's really just seeing are the contractors engaging with the platform and are they closing out tasks? Because we know that if that partnership works, then everything else. All those things that we just discussed will happen and come back
James Dice: part of this, right, is making sure that the software that's selected can come up with valid faults and prioritize those.
So that the things that are getting assigned to the maintenance vendor are the top priority things that are then driving them as energy
Tom Balme: savings, et cetera. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's not necessarily just heading those really heavy sort of high priority faults. It's also mixing that in with, some of the low level stuff as well.
So it's not just saying, Hey, I want you to spend two days, sorting out my chiller staging. I also want you to spend a bit of time. Here's your top 10 worst performing VAVs and this is the reason why I also want you to spend time doing that because then will comfort is also an issue. It's not just about tackling the real.[01:24:00]
High-impact energy saving things. First one use of balanced that time, so that you're also providing value in other areas, as well, as opposed to just saying guys, we're going to go through the biggest energy reductions. We're just going to focus on that and then we'll get to the, to the smallest stuff, because we also care about the smaller stuff as well.
Bryce Anderson: Yeah. I, um, I learned a lot through this process because I didn't, most of the KPI development was with Tom and the amp team and switch, et cetera. So I just basically just wrote up what or copied and pasted in what they, what they'd written up. And I was, I really liked this idea and I'm going to stop you reiterate this, but it is near impossible to prove energy savings as in kilowatt hours.
It's almost impossible to prove that, like on any building that's investing in technology, they're probably also investing in like led upgrades and chiller upgrades and, vertical transport know control, some upgrades, facade stuff. So there's all this stuff happening in these, these big assets.
So, any specification that talks about achieving, Energy efficiency savings is looking for trouble. [01:25:00] Um, and yeah, I, I loved the, I loved the way that they said, look, as long as you log into the platform and they're tracking that don't have logins. And as, as Tom says, they're making comments in the platform.
The other thing we tracked was, um, we got switched to build a thing where, um, they can input how many hours per day they spend on the data driven maintenance and the hours they spend on preventative maintenance, the 50, 50 split. So we can try and track that. And it might not be possible sometimes as much as be more of some sort of a problem, but as long as they are spending the right amount of hours or generally over a 12 month on high value activities and still keeping up to date with preventative maintenance, if you stopped doing preventative maintenance, the thing will stop working.
Um, so like Tom says was like, as long as you're all doing the right thing, what you actually want will come out of the wash. Don't try and monitor that. That was fantastic. I love that. Cool. And
Tom Balme: so, I mean, just to [01:26:00] expand on that, I mean, even, this, this, um, new, new daydream maintenance contract came into effect at the start of this year.
And what we've seen just even in the first couple of months is a real uptick in the amount of both data, doing maintenance tasks that had been closed out. And we've seen by far improved collaboration between the analytics vendor and the BMS contractors. So previously we were averaging, I think, around about a sort of 30 to 40% closure rate on tasks.
So to translate that, if switch were escalating 10 times. Per month at this site, the analytics vendor was closing out three to four of those. We're now heading 70, 80% closure rates purely just by having the correct process to find as to how you're supposed to work together. What that means is we know that if we close out more tasks and we improve that collaboration yeah.
All of those wonderful things will happen. So it is still early days. Um, but we've definitely seen an uptick and this is, [01:27:00] this is purely just by hitting it on the service contract side. And I think to touch on that point, you said before James, there is that, I think the analytics vendors have also clued into this as well.
Right. So they're trying to solve that problem from the platform's perspective as well. There may be. The user interface and the user experience much more friendly for contractors to get in there and use it. They're spending a lot of time, uh, improving the actual diagnostics, improving the fault detection, getting rid of false positives, providing more valuable insights.
Um, and certainly if we attack it from both fronts, we're going to get to the right outcome. I think just by solving the problem with the platform, just by creating a great platform, doesn't necessarily mean, the, your service contractor is going to deliver you a great if they're not incentivized to do this.
And that's, that's always been, I think some of the frustration from some of the analytics vendors, they're just like, we're building these great things and we're making it easier and easier. So why are we not getting the traction that we necessarily wants to see on these sites? And this is where if [01:28:00] you, if we set this up right foundationally with the contractors is that you can turbocharge the.
Both your data driven maintenance, and that's really what we've seen. Um, and it's not through by just relying on the, on the analytics platforms to innovate and create these great solutions. It's just like creating that partnership between the contractor and the vendor, because, analytics as a product, doesn't generate an ROI by itself, unless someone takes that insight.
And so there's an outcome with it. It doesn't matter how good the platform is. Eventually you'll just have this platform generating a bunch of great insights and faults that no one will do anything with. I think that's, that's definitely been the frustration that analytics vendors have always seen. Um, it's just trying to get this way of getting everybody on the same page to do good.
Bryce Anderson: Totally.
James Dice: So we're running up on time here. I want to sort of like conclude by summarizing sort of the outcome. That other owners can [01:29:00] expect if they implement this sort of program. So one of them and you guys correct me if I'm wrong, I'm going to go through the list though. It sounds like one of them is just reduced preventative maintenance contract costs.
Right? Another one is, um, better implementation of analytics faults. Um, so higher, higher implementation rates. Another one is more efficient for the dollars that you're spending on maintenance, better outcomes for those dollars. And then it sounds like another one is reduced reactive maintenance costs through unplanned work orders.
So that's a pretty compelling story that you're in
Bryce Anderson: towns. Parents seem promising
James Dice: and transparency and pricing. Yeah. I mean, that's a pretty compelling story if we could. That's why I wanted to do this podcast. If we can get that story out, I think that's, that's pretty compelling from an owner standpoint,
Bryce Anderson: for sure.
Yeah.
Tom Balme: Yeah. I mean, some of the outcomes, that we [01:30:00] touched on there, in terms of the data to a maintenance, you know, we're getting more high value, data-driven maintenance tasks done that that's been one of the key things, it is early days, but we've seen an uptick already.
The other key thing that we've achieved is we achieved the 21% reduction in our BMS service contract costs. And this hasn't been done by, just screwing the contractor over to say, guys, let's just reduce your hours, reduce your days. We've actually only reduced. Uh, the number of days across the portfolio by about 7%, but the cost has reduced by 21% because the contractors have come to the table and said, yes, okay.
We understand what you're trying to achieve. And we're now going to give you a price that's actually fair and relevant for the outcome. And so, a 21% reduction, across 35 buildings, was, was, was a very big number. Um,
Bryce Anderson: I'm sorry. The other thing is, sorry, I'm keen to see at the end of this year, we'll get reduction of work orders because they're coming to meetings now and they're, they're [01:31:00] actioning tasks now, tuning systems.
So I think they were getting another saving at the end of the year on reduced work orders, which is going to be another very big number.
Tom Balme: That's right. I mean, there's, there's a very real chance that by going through this process, Purely just on the BMS cost reductions alone through service contract cost, reductions, and reactive work, or the cost reductions that that will actually completely offset the cost of analytics without actually having to save a single dollar of energy.
We know that the owners will come right. And then when it, where we're not going to have that really awkward conversation that a lot of analytics providers have with their clients after two, three years. And it says, okay, great, you saved me all this energy. What next? Why should I keep paying you? It's a really tricky conversation to have because you then have to re shape your value proposition to say, ah, but you know, did you know, we're also doing all these things, we're getting more value from service maintenance contracts.
We're increasing asset life cycles, [01:32:00] but if you've been really hard upfront about saying analytics, saves energy, at some point, someone will ask you, well, how much more are you going to save and why should they keep paying you? And that's really. We've already created that OPEX reduction in our budgets and that's budgeted for the next five years.
So that that reduction has already been made and it's already offset the cost of the analytics. So we know that those energy savings will come and they'll continue to come. So all those wonderful outcomes will now just be the fruits of our labor of, of going through this exercise. And we won't have to have that awkward conversation, or we want this to be, part of the new way of doing BMS maintenance.
And we've also started doing this on HVAC as well. Um, we didn't go through the exact same process with each factory. We went through, um, an alternative method with HVAC and we also got a significant cost reduction in our HVAC maintenance contracts as well, and hopefully reactive work orders as well. So there are, there are multiple benefits that can be [01:33:00] delivered, um,
Bryce Anderson: process
James Dice: double click on HVAC.
So we've just been talking about control system monitor. As all of the different silos in the building start to become digital and be able to be monitored. It strikes me as like, and you've talked about this with me before it strikes me as a natural progression to apply these same concepts across other digital systems.
So how do you see, like, what does this mean for other systems in the building, as far as what you guys are thinking about from a maintenance standpoint, moving forward?
Tom Balme: Absolutely. Um, all these other subsystems, whether it be vertical transport or access control, all the vendors, and now extracting data out of these systems installed in gateways and they built their own analytics and dashboards.
Um, and. There's certainly lessons that we can learn from that. I think the journey that we've been through with BMS and apply these learnings to all [01:34:00] these other subsystems, certainly if, if we, all these wonderful data-driven maintenance and, insights and dashboards and analytics are going to be produced, but realistically, if from a service contract perspective, if that's not going to change, they're fundamentally going to keep doing planned preventative maintenance, the same way that they'd been doing it, whether it's a lift or if it's a light or a metering solution, is that if you're not going to evolve and incorporate data-driven maintenance within the value of the contract, as opposed to selling it as a, as an additional add on, then we're going to go through this whole process again of, okay.
Saying, Hey guys, why we pay more for our, for our service contracts and why we pay more and more each year when you're telling me that you've got these wonderful tools that can do things in a smarter way. And we've even had conversations with some OEMs, um, who have openly even said to us that, we started developing these data-driven maintenance solutions, but [01:35:00] you will pay more for these things.
Cause we're not going to change the way that we do our maintenance. They'll, they'll, they'll tell you that, you still need to do all of that plan pro preventive maintenance to maintain the systems properly. And that the data during maintenance solution will just be this additional,
Bryce Anderson: those services are five to 10 years behind the BMS in this journey.
That's what it is. They're there five years ago. So they will get there. We who's going to play that same game.
Tom Balme: Yeah, it is. It is. But you know, we'd like to think that we could take the learnings from BMS and apply across these, uh, we can
Bryce Anderson: assist, we could have that same battle. Again. Sounds fun.
James Dice: Sounds fun. Well, maybe we can do a future episode on what it looks like to apply this same concept across the other silos, but, uh, for now I really appreciate you guys coming on the show. This might be one of our longest episodes, but I think it was worth it to dive into the details. So thanks so much you guys, for sharing your, [01:36:00] your journey.
I think it would be useful for, for others across the world.
Bryce Anderson: That's a pleasure.
James Dice: All right friends, thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus Podcast. For more episodes like this and to get the weekly Nexus Newsletter, which by the way, readers have said is the best way to stay up to date on the future of the smart building industry, please subscribe at nexuslabs.online. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. Have a great day.
âWe realized that we needed to go out to tender nationally for our BMS and HVAC service contracts. We needed to transition these contracts from what was traditionally a plan-preventive-maintenance approach to a much more data-driven approach that ensured we created a collaborative engagement between our service contractor, the analytics vendor, and AMP.
Without that collaboration, we realized that just deploying analytics was not going to get us to the outcome that we wanted to get to."
âTom Balme
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Episode 92 is a conversation with Tom Balme, Building Optimization Manager at AMP Capital, and Bryce Anderson, Independent Building Automation Consultant at Lifecycle Controls.
This is the most Iâve learned in developing a podcast in a long time. If youâre new to the business of building automation, and specifically building automation maintenance contracts, then this is for you.
AMP Capital has one of the largest portfolios of buildings in Australia. Theyâve set out to transform their building operating processes to be more data driven. Well that involves two main stakeholders: the service contractors that maintain the many building automation systems across the portfolio and the analytics software providers that are the newcomers on the block.
AMPâs journey to get all of these stakeholders on the same page is a story with lessons for all of us. They share how theyâve simultaneously reduced preventative maintenance contract costs, improved analytics software ticket closure rates, and reduced unplanned reactive work order costs.
Please enjoy.
You can find Tom and Bryce on LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
Music credit: Dream Big by Audiobingerâlicensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: hello friends, welcome to the nexus podcast. I'm your host James dice each week. I fire questions that the leaders of the smart buildings industry to try to figure out where we're headed and how we can get there faster without all the marketing fluff. I'm pushing my learning to the limit. And I'm so glad to have you here following along.
James Dice: This episode is a conversation with Tom balm, building optimization manager at amp capital and Bryce Anderson. Independent building automation consultant at lifecycle controls. This is the most I've learned in developing a podcast in a really long time. If you're new to the business of building automation and specifically building automation, maintenance contracts.
Then this is for you. Amp capital has one of the largest portfolios of buildings in Australia. They've set out to transform their building [00:01:00] operating processes, to be more data-driven. Well, that involves two main stakeholders. The service contractors that maintain the many building automation systems across the portfolio.
And the analytics software providers that are the newcomers on the block for each building. And P his journey to get all of these stakeholders in the same page. It's a story with lessons for all of us, they share how they simultaneously reduced preventative maintenance contract costs, improved analytics, software ticket, closure rates, and reduced unplanned reactive or recorder costs.
This is a good one. Please enjoy. All right.
Hello, Tom and Bryce. Welcome to the nexus podcast. Let's start with you, Tom. Uh, can you give us your background? Who are you? Can you introduce yourself please?
Tom Balme: Sure. Hi Jameson. Thank you for having us. It's great to be here. Um, so. I worked for amp capital amp capital is a global investment manager with over $150 billion of funds currently under management on behalf of [00:02:00] global investors.
Um, and within the real estate sector, we, one of the largest direct real estate fund managers in APAC with, uh, circa 23 billion in real estate assets currently under management. Uh, my role at amp, uh, is to manage our portfolio wide asset technology deployments, which includes things such as building analytics, frameworks, AI cybersecurity.
James Dice: Very cool. And where are you calling in from your long, long time listener? First time caller, as people say, w where are you calling?
Tom Balme: So calling in from Sydney, Australia? Uh, yes. Have been, I've been listening to the podcast. Uh, I think since the inception, I mean, when we first caught up James, it must've been sort of like three, four years ago.
And I think I was at CIM. Uh, I think we just continued chatting every now and then, um, since that point.
Bryce Anderson: Awesome.
James Dice: All right. And Bryce, you and I just met a couple of weeks ago through Tom's introduction. Do you want to give, uh, [00:03:00] your self-introduction? Who are, who
Bryce Anderson: are you? Yeah, sure. So, um, I'm actually also in Australia, in Melbourne, um, like an hour and a half flight from Sydney.
So we're pretty close, I guess. Um, I'm a BMS sort of specialist consultants, uh, worked for BMS company. For about 15 years in South Africa, London had been in Australia since 2010. And after about 15 years, I've worked with BMS companies and, it's not easy, heavy construction projects, those sort of things.
I decided to try and get out of that. So in around 2014, I went into consulting. So for that the last sort of eight years or so, I've been doing BMS consulting. Most of my customers are either, um, working direct to the owner, being BMS upgrades, specifications, tenders, construction phase. Um, and then I also do quite a bit of new construction work where I'm normally a sub consultant to the mechanical consultant or the builder head contractor, or sometimes independent commissioning agents.
I've got this sort of [00:04:00] even mix across new construction as a BMS specialist, sub consultant or director building owners kind of sought out BMS problems. And then, so that's my main core business, how pay the bills and into the side of that. Um, I have, uh, a small BMS training business. We've had some training courses for mechanical consultants and, BMS engineers.
And I have this YouTube channel, which I sort of started at the start of COVID when I couldn't go anywhere on the weekends. So I was just sitting here staring at Sunday. What should I do? So for two years, on Sundays, I just recorded YouTube videos. That's more difficult. Now my newest resolution for this year is not to work weekends.
So yeah, no videos through February in front of sort of balance that. But that's what it is. A BMS specialists don't ask me anything.
James Dice: Awesome. And for those of you listening that haven't checked out Bryce's channel, which probably, probably most of the people that listen to this show have at least seen one of your videos before.
Um, he's got what [00:05:00] 2000 followers at this point, which is pretty, pretty awesome
Bryce Anderson: and great at milestone. Like last week I was watching it on the weekend, just ticking over. So maybe like in a hundred years I'll get a YouTube, one of those little play banner things when need a hundred thousand, but yeah, it was quite hard, like a thousand a years.
Very difficult to, to get it's a very niche
Tom Balme: industry.
Bryce Anderson: Yeah.
James Dice: Yeah. Tell me about it. Um, I. I love your passion. So you're, you're, you're sitting in the same spot you're sitting in right now. And you're like sometimes like hitting the table and like really, really talking about how things could change. So I love that.
Um, all right. So we got together today to talk about a recent project that you guys have been working on. Um, and we'll talk about it in sort of like a case study analysis mode, but it's also directly applicable to so many buildings across the world. So we're going to shut up, try to tell the story in a way that, um, applies to everybody.
Um, but maybe Tom, you could, you could [00:06:00] maybe just maybe start us out. Um, can you kind of talk about the situation you were in when you're, when you're thinking about trying to shift to data-driven maintenance and then why you brought in Bryce to kind of help things out.
Tom Balme: Look, I mean, um, I think like a lot of sort of other people in this space, I sort of fell into this industry. Um, I, I finished university and, didn't, didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go, but I, knew I wanted to work somewhere that had like a.
Impact on the, on the climate. And this is where I, I was over in the UK and I, I found that I got picked up by a sort of large multi-discipline, uh, building services consultancy. And I, she started out as a what's called like an environmental sustainable design engineer. So ESD for short ASD was this sort of like hybrid between like classic mechanical engineering with building performance modeling and then sustainable design.[00:07:00]
It was really, it was really the building performance modeling. They actually caught me hooked on buildings. You would build these, these models of buildings pre-construction, uh, in using these wonderful programs. Like I S uh, and Bentley, uh, hap and, you would then, build these models and you're parametrically also the design parameters, like window to wall ratios, more efficient chillers led lighting, uh, that kind of thing.
And then, you'd see how much energy the building would use before, before you constructed it. Um, and then, following on from doing the model. I then started doing audits of buildings, uh, where we know you would walk around and as you get your nose into these existing buildings and you serve the condition of the mechanical plants, uh, you'd access the BMS and downloads of whatever trend data you could kind of get out of it, which at the time, re really wasn't that much.
And then you'd come up that, shopping list of sort [00:08:00] of energy conserving measures to come back to the client with. Um, and that's where I looked back and I realized like, what I was doing was almost like the human version of building analytics before analytics was ever a thing.
Um, trying to understand what was going on and finding, finding discrepancies and faults and, uh, and issues. And, this is where I really started seeing the Delta and the difference between the buildings that I was modeling pre-construction and then what was actually out there in the real world would be.
With things that you would pick up on site, like, why is equipment running 24 7 and why the pumps have like a VSD installed, but running it like a hundred percent speed there's this discrepancy. Right. And I couldn't rationalize it. Um, and it was during that time when I was doing an order, I think I was over in Canada at the time, I stumbled across this sort of other new technology, which was building analytics.
One of the buildings I was auditing had analytics [00:09:00] installed and the FM had access to it. And all of a sudden it provided me with all of these trends that I would painstakingly have to try and get out of the VNF like a bit a mess myself. Um, and then, analyze and spreadsheets, all of a sudden, all this wonderful trend data was there.
It was available and, and it automatically. Yeah, a whole bunch of recommendations that I would spend hours deliberating on an analyzing just to get to a point of saying, oh, like, did you know X, Y, Z. Um, and, and this kind of blew my mind. It was like, okay, this is, this is the future. Like I kind of saw it and got it.
And that's when that's, when eventually I came back to Australia and ended up working for, for CIM, uh, one of the sort of largest building analytics providers over here in Australia, um, working in both the engineering side and sales side, uh, eventually before, getting, getting a call to come join client side with amp, [00:10:00] it was too good to refuse.
So it's been, um, been an interesting journey up to this point and let's put
Bryce Anderson: it this way. Tom and I met was about five years ago. I'd been engaged to run an analytics tenders out on an analytics specification and ran a tender phase. But for analytics and Tom was one of the tenders and like many situations now he's the customer.
James Dice: Well, I, I identify so much. And Tom, you and I probably talked about this the first time we met a couple years back, but that journey was like so similar to my journey into analytics as well. And I'll point people back to the podcast with Leon, Wurfel from bueno. That was exactly his path as well. We're all doing this, we're all doing this in spreadsheets.
I would even add that I was installing data loggers. So a lot of times you didn't even have the data in the BMS. So you're out there installing data loggers to even get the data, to even get it into the spreadsheet.[00:11:00]
Tom Balme: I mean, you kind of tell people who getting into the industry. We just assume that this like data and analytics has always been there and it's like, I promise you, it definitely wasn't, getting, getting data out of a BMS was really hard work, whatever trend there were were often, no, not longer than like seven days old and not all points were trended.
And, like it never used to be this way. Um, but you know, it definitely gave me like a really good appreciation of, just what a jump analytics made for people that were consulting in existing buildings. And, I, I think starting out in that, in that consultant type world before then making the jump over to the technology has given me a good appreciation of just what kind of benefits it delivers.
James Dice: Absolutely. All right. So, so at ANP, take us through kind of how you're trying to, uh, implement analytics and kind of what your goals are.
Tom Balme: Yeah. So the journey with amp was, um, that's, [00:12:00] they, they were looking for one analytics provider across the entire portfolio. Uh, before I joined amp, they had, uh, a number of providers.
Um, typically the incumbent Bemis contracts would have their own analytics solution deployed, uh, or there were some independent, third party solutions also deployed across a range of assets. We, we have over 60 buildings that we manage across, commercial office, retail, shopping centers and logistics of which about 40 or so have a BMS, and about 10 to 15 of those had analytics deployed.
And so what they were looking for was, a portfolio wide solution which could then be deployed to streamline the delivery of analytics, provide standardized reporting, all the sort of benefits that come from having one solution across, across an entire portfolio. And so, before I joined the actually they decided to roll out and switch automation as the building analytics [00:13:00] provider across the portfolio.
And a big part of why they asked them to join amp was to manage that roll out process and to help, I suppose, make that transition over to data driven maintenance. What AMP were looking to do was to not just deploy analytics and just, say, hey, walk away, that's our Dodger and maintenance solution done dusted.
What we were discovering when we had switch deployed was that we were still in encountering some of the really old traditional blockers that, I think a lot of people who've worked in analytics, had encountered. You would have a monthly meeting with your HVAC and your BMS service contractor, each at the sites.
And at some sites, some contractors, were still refusing to walk up to a meeting because it wasn't in their contract. It wasn't part of their existing deliverables and scope and other buildings. I think anyone who's worked in analytics has probably come across this exact scenario where [00:14:00] you rock up to a managed service meeting and you're presenting the same issue month after month.
And wondering why is this not getting closed out? And the answer, isn't the fact that like the fault is bad, that it's a false positive, or that the insight isn't genuine or accurate. The issue was more the fact that the contractor didn't have any, it wasn't part of their scope to actually listen and allow time in their day to actually close out these issues.
And this is where we realized that we needed to also go out to tender nationally for our BMS and HVAC service contracts. And we needed to transition these contracts from what was traditionally a plan-preventive-maintenance approach to a much more data-driven approach that ensured that we created a collaborative engagement between our service contractor, the analytics vendor, and AMP. Without that collaboration, [00:15:00] we realized that just deploying analytics was not going to get us to the outcome that we wanted to get to
James Dice: got it. And so that's when we brought in Bryce to sort of help help with
Tom Balme: that's. Right. We, I mean, I, I started reviewing our BMS contracts across the portfolio and we started thinking about ways that we could drive collaboration and engagement between the analytics vendor and the BMS contractor.
And we, we actually created a specification, um, with the help of a mechanical con consultant. And specification was, pretty good. Uh, and we'd also just, I suppose, explained all of the outputs and reporting and dashboards that would come from the switch platform. Um, and I sort of realize that, other than, the Bemis contract has Rocky up to a meeting and closing out a few handful of faults every month where we actually [00:16:00] going to change the behaviors of the BMS contractors.
So where are we actually solving the problem of this engagement piece between the contractors? And that's where I realized that we really needed the specialist advice of someone who's worked in the BMS service industry and can help guide us in this transition towards data drew made sense. So that's where I got in contact with Bryce and we took him through what we created and we just asked Bryce with what we've created, is this going to lay the foundation to start solving the problem?
Uh, and for us, his reaction was pretty blunt. Uh, he just said, okay, No, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was just a flat, no, where like, just explaining one analytics platform creates and does doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to change the behavior of the BMS contracts on the site.
They're largely still going to be doing planned preventative maintenance. So this is where we have Bryce to step in, uh, and provide his expertise.[00:17:00]
James Dice: before you get going on this. For anyone, that's a beginner to this topic and doesn't understand how these things work. Could you just explain from the standpoint of your expertise, kind of what Tom just said?
So we have analytics software, it's identifying faults that needed to be fixed in the BMS. And then we have a contractor that is the, the one that needs to solve that problem for the owner. Can you, can you kind of explain that dynamic? Like why is it their job to fix it? Why, why is it set up in this way?
Bryce Anderson: Yeah, so the thing is with, cloud-based technology providers and analytics is there's a lot of roadblocks for it to actually be effective and successful and, simply by analytics and providing. Although it spits out useful information, valuable insights. Um, that doesn't mean you gonna get a good outcome and what I've, since might've been [00:18:00] restructuring maintenance contracts for that five years, what I've realized is I can write anything in a maintenance specification.
I can say to that, you must collaborate with the technology provider and you must do this, and you must do that. And you must allow for optimization and energy efficiency and enhancements. I can write all this in specification. That doesn't mean you actually going to get the outcome because there's real roadblocks in the way that just words in a document don't resolve.
Um, so as, as Tom was saying, they had the specification, which said all the right things, how to say to them saying the wrong things, isn't going to get you there. We've got to address every single road. And solve that problem. Um, the specification is it's one tool. It's a piece of the puzzle to an overall solution.
It's a piece of that puzzle. It's not, not the whole solution and that's the mistake some people make. Um, so [00:19:00] the problem we're having with Thomas saying there is, um, a building owner, let's say they're spending, a hundred thousand Australian dollars on a preventative maintenance contract.
The miss camp is getting paid to come to site one day a week and do preventative maintenance. In other words, check every single piece of equipment in theory. Yeah. 12 month cycle. What happens is that building owners Ingo has spent $20,000 a year, Australian dollars a year on some technology and predictive maintenance.
And know the idea is that. Well, we're investing $20,000
Tom Balme: so that we have,
Bryce Anderson: we can reduce our service hours, our physical checks, and it should offset. So should go from a hundred thousand dollars contract up to one 20 and efficiencies brings it back down to a hundred that's what's supposed to happen. Like that makes sense to everybody.
The problem is that BMS companies and rightfully so, don't want to give away $20,000 of revenue on every single site. They have KPIs to increase their revenue every year and make [00:20:00] more money, not to make less money. So the issue is that I always say to building owners, if you're a, if you're a building owner and you want to deploy technology, or if you're an analytics company who has a product to sell, both of you have to address the BMS as part of that.
Um, because what I've noticed happens is that. Definitely in the last five years, it might be changing now, but a lot of BMS comp, a lot of analytics companies tend to try and beat up the BMS company. They think that they're run the analytics engine and it spits out all these faults and they say the owner, we can't amazing.
We are no, we've just done all these broken things. These BMS scars are terrible. They're so bad. You should give us more of your buildings. Like that's the strategy. But what happens is the BMS company gets upset about that and digs their heels in. And does the things that Tom said, they were saying they won't come to meetings, not proactively responding to alerts.
They're not [00:21:00] like being a part of the complete solution. So the first thing is at least competing to realize that for your system to be effective, you have to work with the BNS company. Everybody has to be happy. If someone's unhappy, you've Tom's not happy. Well, I'm not happy or the LED's not happy, or you're also happy someone's going to be, there's gonna be a problem.
Right. So. You. And that's why we get, when we very first started the journey between IP myself, we decided that we're going to do this thing, but at no point, are we going to beat up the BMS company or try and disadvantage them? They're all going to lose something. And I can example of this being a process was where, um, we built a spec first, right?
And it solved a lot of our problems. And I said to Tom, if we issued a spec to over 30 camp, 30 sites, over 14 different companies, they're gonna have a heart attack. And they're going to get very defensive about how we're trying to, because we were completely changing entirely how this works. So I said to Tom, look, why don't [00:22:00] we set up a live stream with every single company?
And I will present this thing to them in just like normal talk. And I said to them, look, guys, you know, I'm gonna be honest with you. You're not going to like this, but we can't continue. To be processing a maintenance on the same model as preventative maintenance model. We can't continue to price like that when we're running technology and it's changing.
So why is she wanting to mention that part about that first live stream was we had to take the BMS company on a journey with us. That's what had to happen. We couldn't just try and be too heavy handed with it. So the point here is really that, to solve this problem, it's, it's a process and lot of work, it's not just a document.
The document doesn't do anything. Like we ha aspects says that in the morning, before lunch, you will do this. And then off you had a sandwich for lunch, that's taken off the day. You will do this. This is how we're gonna measure you. [00:23:00] One of the BMS copies didn't mind that they said, well, that's great because now we know exactly how you're gonna measure us.
We know the end of the year, we have a satisfied customer. With the moment now we don't have satisfied customers generally. So I guess, yeah, that's what the main problem was. I guess. So Tom and him did a lot of work before I got there, as he said, they had done a lot of analysis around their current portfolio and they gave me these big spreadsheets that had all the sites in and, and how many, what the preventative maintenance costs were per year for the sites and another column, which was, this is how much money we're spending for each site on additional work orders.
And when I saw that number at the bottom, I could not believe that the amount of money that amp was spending on preventative maintenance, like million dollar numbers and the percentage of additional cost on top of that for work orders was unbelievable. So when we started this, we all had different sort of [00:24:00] objectives.
My objective personally was that Tom wanted me to write, build something that facilitates. Forced the collaboration between the technology providers and the DMS companies, not just with scoping words, but credit process, that makes it happen. But what I wanted to do was I wanted to, um, try and reduce the work orders because a lot of the stuff that was being charged for us as extras in my mind should be a part of normal maintenance.
So the big piece around restructuring around what is now considered additional work, it's clear, it's defined that, logging into the workflow management tool of the X platform is not additional responding to those alerts going and fixing things, coming back, logging back in, taking it off. That's not extra work.
Tuning is not extra work option optimizations on extra work, going to meetings is not extra work. And we had to obviously change how we do things to free up the time to do that. But, and the other thing I wanted to do was this is a really [00:25:00] key part. My current specifications, before this journey or. I just document this amazing documents.
Um, but it required a lot of my time to make the process work. I'd have a lot of meetings with one-to-one the BMS company, lots of renegotiations around Anglosec. Why does that cost that like read this part of the spec. It tells you what to do. Lots of that sort of education piece. When Tom came to me and said, we've got to roll this out across the whole portfolio, I was like, oh my gosh, like my thing can go across the whole portfolio because I can't fight with 14 companies over 30 sites.
So I had to build this complete new spec that was designed in a way that it could go out across a whole portfolio. And, um, it come back and didn't require a lot of work from us. So what I did, one of the things was, I didn't want to have to review, 30 or so mate's proposals and read these proposals that all were formatted differently and set things differently and include different things.
I cried. These tend to forms for the tender foreman, [00:26:00] answer these questions. Break your cost down like this. And that was like a big thing. So we, a lot of success there that amp wants to in every two years, re-issue the tender across their incumbents because they've tweaked something or they're getting more effective results from technology.
It's like, it's a simple thing. We re-issued the process bang. It goes, there comes back in a month. We're done, so I really wanted to try and create this sort of scalable solution. So to summarize that, the first thing we had to do was facilitate better collaboration. There was a person we had to do, and we did that.
There was, that was good and easy enough. The second thing was to create transparency in processing. I just want to just touch on for a second. When Tom gave you back all these spreadsheets of the whole portfolio and we'd filtered the sods from the biggest. The smallest sites, the cost for maintenance was not the highest to the lowest.
We would, we looked at the pricing was [00:27:00] completely random. It's just like all over the place. Two buildings, exact same size, double the process. So what we managed to create, which is really proud of is amp now has a baseline for what maintenance costs, because there's a structure to it. And it's clear what has to be done, not get done.
So we now have the biggest buildings cost the most and the smallest Williams cost the least. And it it's like that. Now there are places where it jumps around a bit because there's other challenges with some of the buildings are older when you, whatever it is. But generally we now know what maintenance costs, regardless of who the provider is.
So yeah, I guess Tom had like a wishlist of these are the things we're trying to achieve. And my job was to, to take that wishlist of stuff and build something. And achieve that. That was like, that was the main focus of the project, which, which was like per difficult.
James Dice: It sounds like it. So I want to key in, on two things before we kind of [00:28:00] go further with this story.
One is Tom, can you explain the, the difference between a task that you would expect as the owner now that you're on the owner side, you would expect to be underneath the maintenance contract and then a task that you were getting charged, these reactive work orders for, and then maybe like throw in, where does the analytics task come in?
How do you think about these sort of three buckets of tasks? Clarify that for people.
Tom Balme: I suppose, when we were starting to have a switch person engaged across the portfolio, and we were attending these, these, these, monthly managed service meetings, we found this incredible discrepancy and variability in what contract is deemed to be included as part of their scheduled maintenance and what was done outside of scheduled maintenance.
And they would have to charge additional for, um, in a incredibly extreme example. I think we chatted about this before we [00:29:00] rocked up to one service meeting and the contract was being asked to calibrate some senses. One of them was a zone temperature sensor, and there was an issue with it. It needs to be calibrated in the contract to say, yes, of course I'll do that.
As part of my scheduled maintenance, the second sensor was a VAV air flight center. And when we reviewed it, the contract said, yeah, look, actually, I'm going to get a ladder and get up into the ceiling space. I'm going to need a work order for that. That is not included. It was like this, this isn't included.
And it was just sort of like, this was, what do you mean? It's not included and it's just go, well, that's going to take me a bit more time. I have to get a ladder to get up into the ceiling space. And so it was, it was just sort of like, do you have a ladder causing your contracts so I can kinda, kinda showing it there's, there's there's ladder clause saying that a ladder, is something that you deem chargeable and extra, but you know, it, what it really highlighted was that we had absolutely no visibility or transparency on what a [00:30:00] contractor den chargeable or not chargeable.
It had been left up to them. And often we would just approve these work orders because the time, they would communicate to us that, I need to spend most of my time doing all these other things as part of my plan prevented maintenance and a lot of the tasks that were coming out of sweater.
Or any billing analytics provider for that matter. A lot of them, they, they will come back and say, Hey, I'm going to need some additional time. I'm going to need to create a work or it's come back to site and fix these problems. And unfortunately, in a lot of cases, we didn't have a leg to stand on at that point.
There, there wasn't anything to say that, if switch gives you an insight or any Alex provider gives you an insight, that they need to respond to it. And this was a big problem. And what it, what it really highlighted was that we needed to clearly define what was to be included as part of scheduled maintenance moving forward.
And then what was an actual task of which, could genuinely create a work order for, so we went through [00:31:00] carefully define those things.
Bryce Anderson: Yeah. Tom, I just want to jump in there that, we're joking about the letter thing, wrap it in the BMEs company to. Um, when they press preventative maintenance, they don't tend to, they don't allow to go to the VAV boxes cause there's a thousand of them.
Right. So they don't go to them the letter. So there are situations where you know, that the event comes in, go look at the vid box. It's pretty reasonable. However, they did have an allowance actually in the contract to go onto the floors up a letter to the ceiling out. So what if, what if I make here is that a lot of the times?
Um, so like some of the times the BMS company has just been difficult and we have a lot of examples of that, but they all, a lot of situations where there just, isn't a clear understanding between the analytics providers, um, engineer, who's managing the managed service. Who's running those meetings. They might not clearly understand exactly how BMS companies are engaged.
What they contract say and what they're supposed to do. Um, and [00:32:00] again, and as Tom said that the big issue was that, the only piece of paper that the owner can go back to, to reference in a dispute is the BMS companies, um, maintenance
Tom Balme: proposal, which
Bryce Anderson: is obviously written for their advantage.
Nothing's a bad thing it's written like that that's fair enough. Right? Um, we're now when you have the spec, the specs black and white, that's what you got to do. So the owner can go back, pull this back out. Page 10. Sorry guys. You got to do that. Um, the other thing was, that was interesting is that. Um, traditionally what consultants try and do it for to resolve this is they try and list out all of the stuff that is now included.
So you kind of listen, you say, okay, you've got to go and check all these things and you can never list out everything. It's a three page list of stuff to go that that's now included. The problem is you can never actually get that whole list accurate. And when we, when we built our spec, um, we actually had cut down.
My [00:33:00] previous book was cut down to a more simple version for amp, cause it had to be simple. Right? And I said to Tom, look, let's not try and define exactly what you will do, what you won't do. Let's rather say how many hours you spend on that and how many hours you spend on that. So our very first basic version, just to dumb it down for the, for this discussion here, we said from now on, in rough terms, when the technician comes to socks, the first half of the day, Everything you do is for free.
The first half that I can make you do anything for analytics. If you gotta go choose something, you're gonna make a slot software change. If you go to rebuild some points in the graphic, do some something, whatever comes out of that machine is not chargeable. Unless you go to buy something, go to buy an actuator.
That's chargeable to buy a sensor that's chargeable, but labor hours, first half the day, anything goes have lunch. Second half the day. Now the key here was to be fair, right? The second [00:34:00] half that I was on the second all day, you do whatever you want to do. Go do all your preventative maintenance tasks that are important to you.
Backing up databases, network, integrity, checks, checking the antivirus, whatever it is because we had to be fair. I couldn't just say from now on you just look at the analytics because annex doesn't do everything. So there was a, uh, an approach to around let's find something that's that's, um, fair to everyone.
Still focused on things that you have to do your core stuff, go and do preventative maintenance on stuff that annex con check those dampers there. We can't check them. You go check them. So there's, that was a key sort of thought process around the current way, how we specifying it, isn't working. It's hard to measure.
I imagine it now is very easy. How many hours are you on switch? How many hours are you on? Preventative maintenance is very easy to measure. And then we said, so we did that and we workshopped it with amp and like, does this work as it going to work? We, we spoke to the industry and I said, if I had some courses, if I did this, how would you react?
We had to either [00:35:00] sort of discussions with BNS companies. They're not what we did was you said, hold on a sec, it's a bit disjointed to do four hours, four hours, four hours, four hours. So it basically comes around to half of your time. Half of your labor hours are allocated to awesome. The other half is traditional work.
So if we got a big problem with the analytics and we need two days, go spend two days, redo that code, rebuild the database, fix that thing, work back those days, catch them up somewhere else. So I said an extreme example. You can do six months of high value maintenance and you can do six months of, core, preventative type of stuff.
But the key here is that again, the point from making is you have to resolve the actual roadblock with a solution. You can't just say, I want you to be better.
James Dice: Totally. I want to circle back also on something you said earlier, Bryce, about how, what you [00:36:00] found was that. Well, I want to talk, I want to talk about how these three things can get stacked up from a pricing standpoint. So you have an initial maintenance contract. You then come in with analytics and I'm making some hand gestures for those of you that are just on audio right now.
So you have this contract for maintenance annual contract. You now have this stacked on top of it, an annual analytics software costs, right. And then also you're then potentially having an, a, these pull through these work orders that are basically like, okay, you want us to work with the analytics provider?
We're going to charge you extra for that. So I'm viewing that as like, what I'm hearing from you guys is that's like the worst case scenario right now where you, you basically have. Silos, essentially you have your maintenance site low and you have your analytics, software silo, and the owner is essentially being charged twice potentially, or being charged very inefficiently for those two things.
When what you guys are [00:37:00] talking about as a way to integrate them together, is that kind
Bryce Anderson: of what I'm hearing? Let me expand on that. Cause, um, it's, it's, um, even more interesting than that. So you're competing your rights as to before there's, there's the, the chunk of money for the technician to come to slot in additional investment for technology and another investment to go and fix those things.
That's right. This is the part that I find most interesting. I think BMS companies probably originally five to 10 years ago when they developed their own incumbent technology platforms, they probably intended it for it to be the way it's supposed to be. However it happened when it went to market. In my personal opinion, my experiences that's how the game was played.
So BMS company would say, you want a biotechnology it's extra. I mean, now, because they did that, they made it cost prohibitive and owners didn't take it up. That's why in the start, this wasn't going everywhere. So [00:38:00] BNS companies, because they didn't, they, because they developed a tool, but didn't restructure their whole process.
They didn't do that. They created this market for cloud based technologies. They created that market and that's when, then owners were getting annoyed and they were going to third-party companies to do this. Like if BMS companies did the right thing, 10 years ago, every single building in the world right now would have analytics by the incumbent business provider.
There'd be no market for third-party cloud technology. There'd be no market for it. They created that market. Know, like a little bit greedy maybe and they got bitten. The problem is this. This is the big problem. Now is that in the last 12 months, when I'm reviewing tenders, I've noticed that BMS companies on no lo no longer charging, very high subscription services for analytics anymore.[00:39:00]
Sometimes you're being tennis bought years ago, they were putting in like, 30, 40,000 Australian dollars a year subscription service for analytics and keeping the same, a hundred grand there. They've gotten burned by that now because somebody else now has taken a piece of their market cloud-based companies.
And they've realized that they shot themselves in the foot. So now I'm noticing the last 12 months they are now restructuring. Like they should have 10 years ago, and it's now becoming more attractive. I have a feeling that the way it's going, and I'm just going to put this out there. I could be wrong.
It's a very good chance that. The market for third-party cloud analytics might disappear because if I'm sitting here and I'm going a building, I'm going to be in this company. And that is saying, look, you're paying a hundred grand preventative maintenance. We want to integrate our technology into our maintenance contracts.
We're going to absorb that cost. So you have to pay any extra, but you're gonna get the technology and I'll [00:40:00] tell you what I'm gonna do for the first three months. I'll actually use my service maintenance hours to engineer the whole thing. So I'm, I'm gonna apologize up front. You're not going to see my tech for three months.
I'm gonna use those that money to engineer the thing, absorbed the subscription service and restructure my thing. Once the BMS companies realize that, which is not rocket science, why would you go to a third-party company and pay them $20,000 a year? Why would you do that? So, yeah, that's a pretty interesting thing.
It's almost like we might come in a full circle, but the luckily for the technology companies, the BMS companies are not that organized. So for them to actually like, we could make them do it. Like if amp came to me, I couldn't say, oh, you expect to force that to happen. You don't need, you don't need switch automation.
Right. That's not what their vision was. It wasn't their technology roadmap that we're building towards. But, um, is a thing that's going to happen there. I think. Yeah. I mean,
James Dice: I would challenge you a little [00:41:00] bit and say that the products that most of the big BMS companies have are not up to par from a. FDD standpoint compared to a lot of,
Bryce Anderson: yeah, I agree.
Now the, um, the specialists are building a tool that they're specialists in and they have resources every day, refining and making a single beautiful, right. The BMS company, it's a bit of a, an extra bolt on to their service. So you are correct, but there's a thing that can easily be fixed. That can be fixed.
That is not fixing it. Totally. No, you are right. If you like, it's better to have a dedicated company with dedicated resources focusing on Guinness, right. At the BMEs company focus on their strengths. So yeah, I do agree with what you're saying. I'm just saying that there is a route off this whole thing to get, go, to do a circle.
It would require it would require what you're saying
James Dice: is it require process transformation, not just a product,
Bryce Anderson: a hundred [00:42:00] percent. I'm just working on a maintenance restructure right now, do your yesterday. And the client's telling me that for the last two years, the BMS company, it's their incumbent, um, analytics, they're paying extra for it.
He says those for the techs are not even looking at it because no one, no one has integrated the service technician and train them. This is now what you have to do. Stop walking around and looking for broken things. So they're setting the right thing and they got the wrong product, but they didn't tell the guy with the safety boots on or the goal of the safety boots on that's different now.
Just one more thing. I was really just getting an idea there. Other, a massive hospital a few years ago with multiple buildings and we sat there and I said, listen to the beat of the cabinet. It wasn't. Yeah, this is how it's going to happen. And the account manager stayed with the BMS. He said, I really love what you're doing there.
He has a great idea. But as for the technician, is he coming here are days a week for 20 years. I [00:43:00] don't think that he will change. I don't think how's that. Did you think that, did you say that? I just heard you say that might be true, but don't tell them me and the customer that this whole thing can't work because your tech doesn't want to do it anyway.
That's it fascinating,
James Dice: Tom, I'd love to hear your reaction to that from the owner standpoint. Right? So the reason I'm asking this. Is for all the other owners, right. That out there right now that have a portfolio and they have service contracts, diverse service contracts, they're hiring third-party analytics.
How would you recommend that they structure, what should they expect from a pricing standpoint? Um, and these contracts?
Tom Balme: Well, I mean, for, for most owners out there that, invest in third party analytics, they're, they're probably getting some really great outcomes from that analytics, they're definitely getting things such as, energy efficiency, [00:44:00] reductions, they're likely getting thermal comfort improvements and they're likely getting, uh, increased asset life cycles and equipment, life cycles, by fixing things better and sooner and quicker, what they're probably not getting is actually.
Better value form their existing service contracts and that shift over to, to data driven maintenance. And certainly when we went through and we reviewed our own service contracts and we had a look at, just the, I think what we've been speaking about here when we were, when we had a look Hertz, we went through our existing contracts and we saw that, largely, even at sites where we had an incumbent, um, uh, an analytics solution was that, effectively that plan prevented maintenance costs was not being reduced.
Um, and simply these investments in these technologies, weren't actually stripping back the need for planned preventative maintenance. It was [00:45:00] simply just being added on top as an additional cost. And so what I'm saying to, I suppose, to other owners is that there's an opportunity here to say generally, The, uh, technology now has been out for well over 10 years is that there is a better way to get more value out of your existing service contracts.
And we believe that we've, we've found a way to do it. And certainly some of the outcomes that we'll discuss later, I think we're showing that we've seen an uptick, uh, in these outcomes, but there's certainly, there's certainly, uh, I think there's perception was out there in the market, this investment in these analytics technologies, remote monitoring tools, energy management systems, we're going to strip away the need and the cost of planned preventative maintenance.
But in reality, when we went through the numbers, we saw that that plan, preventative maintenance scope wasn't being reduced and all this investment in technologies was just increasing the cost of BMS maintenance each. [00:46:00] And then when we were installing these technologies, you then need to actually have more maintenance to service, more sensors, to then service, more metering, uh, and costs were actually spiraling out of control.
And I think from the analytics company's perspective, it's some of these costs that typically they don't capture, right? They'll, they'll, they'll typically come along and say, Hey, pay us 20 grand. And we'll save you 20 grand of energy. This year it'll be a cost neutral service. But what they don't realize is that the client has probably spent $10,000 that year.
In reactive work orders to get the BMS contractors, to close out these tasks. Those costs never, ever captured by the analytics platform, but as a client is certainly hits our profit and loss.
Bryce Anderson: And
James Dice: with that further though, real quick, a lot of the analytics providers will also try to claim maintenance savings in their ROI calculation as well.
And that's only going to happen, right? If you're actually making sure [00:47:00] that those dollars are being saved, like you guys are.
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Tom Balme: Absolutely analytics providers, well, if you look in the, if you look in the pitch deck sales deck of any analytics solution, you'll see somewhere in there, it'll say something along the lines of streamlined maintenance or maintenance efficiencies, something along those lines.
In reality, those efficiencies are not being delivered. [00:48:00] Simply raising a bunch of faults each month, isn't going to actually reduce maintenance or streamline maintenance. What it is often doing is just adding time and adding costs to our existing maintenance contracts, because there's nothing in our existing contracts that says, guys, we need to collaborate.
We need to define what's chargeable and what's not chargeable. And is there an opportunity to actually reduce the cost of this contract? And this is where this is where, we, we realize and we'd analyze, 35 plus bills. And, over the span of, the past five years, our BMS maintenance contract costs had just gone up and up and up.
Uh, and we didn't have any control over that. Yeah.
Bryce Anderson: Can I just jump in quickly tell them I was just listening to sign there. And, um, one of the failures of my product for the last five years was that I could issue the specification and I could generate collaboration and I could, um, I could change how companies do things, but what I could [00:49:00] never do was it's get the process to be the right price.
What happened is the BMS company still has enough room to make up whatever price they want. You know what I mean? Like you say, you have to collaborate. Well, what does that mean? Is that $10,000 or $50,000? And they might say, well, we're going to go into chiller plant room and we're gonna do one day of maintenance per year in the chiller plant room.
But somebody else says we're gonna do three days a year in the chiller plant room. So what our been struggling with the last five years before the amp thing. I had no control over what the, what it would cost. It could cost anything like anything. It could be a hundred thousand dollars. It could be $10,000.
It could be $10,000, whatever they want it to be. That's what it could be. So when we started this journey, I was sitting there thinking, man, if these guys are going to pay me to build this thing and I write up all the scope and all the pricing comes back and the pricing across the portfolio goes up 50%.
I'm not going to be very popular. Probably won't be on this podcast right now. Um, [00:50:00] so my biggest stress was how do we do this thing? Get the collaboration to get a handle on solving this problem that the preventative maintenance costing must come down a little bit to try not to set the technology. And I was sitting there and how I normally do it is I normally just keep negotiating three or four times until we get.
We meet halfway, but I knew, as I said before, that was, was not gonna be possible on the scale of it. So I sat there and I, I said to Tom and Daniel, I said, listen, here, we have to tell them what the maintenance costs. That was a very stressful thing for me. We need to come up with a system or, or a process or a formula for every building that we tell them, this building needs one day a week maintenance.
And that's going to line up with the collaboration piece and preventative maintenance, all sorts of things. This building [00:51:00] needs one day a month. That was very stressful for me because to go to a VMs company, who's had free rein to do whatever price and they want for 100 years and now say, Hey, I'm going to tell you what, how much it costs.
So, yeah, I was super stressed, but what I'm going to say here was that again, is a situation where if you want to get a handle on that process, And you want to try and massage it so that it's reasonable and it's in line with the way digitize and maintenance. You have to tell them what to do, what it costs.
So, yeah, that was so I was like, when, when the tennis came through, I was like, oh my God, like, please let us work. Um, and we, we got it right. We just, we got it rots. It was balanced. The contractors. Weren't, it's a funny Strom to try and use appropriate language. But the way I described as Brittany was we need to the BMS companies to be a [00:52:00] little bit unhappy, but not angry that they're going to dig their heels in.
We had to try and get this to a point that they understand. They don't love it, but they know it's the way we ask you that, that number, that balance had to be right. Otherwise they would just dig the heels and say, I'm not doing nothing. It's a proprietary system. You have no options. You could know where to go.
We won't do it. So. To get what we've been talking about here for the last 10 minutes around, because we're not checking everything in 12 months, we need that piece. Um, so be brave,
James Dice: maybe back up a little, just a second. So there's the, the combining the two costs together. You want to make that efficient, but I think what you're also hitting on here, Bryce is the fact that when you guys looked across the amp portfolio, you had that randomness that you talked about earlier, and you had some prices, some BMS, it wasn't just analytics are not integrated into these processes.
There was also just some [00:53:00] prices that were astronomical. I mean, I think you, you guys showed me the spreadsheet. We can't publish it. There were some that were two to three times what others were on a hour by hour or per square foot basis. The way I understand it. So we're talking about basically, it's not just creating a spec and a standard for how maintenance is done.
You guys also created a, like a standard for the pricing aspect
Bryce Anderson: of this. Yeah, that's what I've said in the start. I said that imp now has a baseline for what maintenance costs. That's what I meant when I said that if they build a brand new, new construction job right now out of the ground, and it's 50,000 square meters and it's this, this and this, we know what's going to cost right now.
And we got, when we get pricing, we know what's fair and reasonable. Cause we've, we've done the hard work to, to rationalize all of it. I want to just expand on one thing here. Um, because people might think that BMS companies are ripping their customers off and they're. A little bit maybe, but this is what's happening, right?
When you're doing heavy, new construction, [00:54:00] construction departments of BMS companies have a very good idea of what the market value is to build this new site, because they're continually tested in the tender phase. They know that this is a million-dollar BMS installed. They know that the in-service departments don't have that experience.
So the account manager who's putting together your price of a hundred thousand Australian dollars a year for maintenance, that account manager with no disrespect, four years ago, as a service technician. And two years before that was a, an electrician or a mechanical tech or whatever they were, they've worked this company, they don't, they don't know what the market value is.
And haven't worked for lots of other companies, but what happens is people like me and Tom and the amp ops managers and facility managers that have been around for 20 or 30 years have worked on four or five different buildings. They have a good idea of what. Value for money, it looks like. So I think sometimes a BMS, a cabinet just follows their process, puts the fee in and [00:55:00] we all start hating on them.
Not because they're trying to rip us off. It's just that they don't know what other companies are charging. That's those spreadsheets we looked at before. We can look at that it's it's particular companies. I'm not going to be more descriptive in that there are particular companies that are consistently dramatically more expensive than other companies.
And it just means that, these companies are still processing maintenance the same way they did in 2001, they haven't realized that the market is changing. So I really want to make it very clear to all your listening here at BMS companies, get a bad rep all the time. And a lot of the time there's actually a reason why that is.
That's why it is. So I'll sometimes have owners come to me and say, bras. We also unhappy that BMS company find us a way out. We upgrade the thing or we, we get who are their agents [00:56:00] who can maintain a systems. The same, every time I go to be in his company, I said, listen, yet, the customer is very unhappy with you.
What are you guys doing? Nelson? This is what they say. We talked about. We're doing exactly what our preventative maintenance contract says we should do. As far as we're concerned, we're in a great job. It's just that the, this companies are not aligned with what the owners want or what the market demands, which is very different to, I was a service technician in London, 2002, 2003, 2004.
All I had to do to be a superhero service technician was get to sot on Tom sonnet at the keys, say hello to the facility manager, look busy for six hours. on Tom and issue my report because in those days we didn't have electric meters. We didn't have integrations. We didn't care at all about energy efficiency.
And that was [00:57:00] important. Comfort control. That's comfortable. You did a good job that is no longer acceptable nowadays. However, that preventative maintenance contract, if you read it and you read one from the same company, 10, 15, 20 years ago, it's the same document. It just has some more beautiful pictures, a bit more marketing about AI, ML, awesomeness, energy efficiency.
It's those words that are in there, but the actual, what they're actually doing, hasn't really changed.
Tom Balme: Yeah. I mean, just to jump in now, I mean, when we reviewed our existing BMS maintenance contracts, even some of the so-called data-driven maintenance contracts that we had, it would be a 40 page document of which 39 and a half pages in it describing.
Plan preventative maintenance and a preventive maintenance schedule. These are the tasks that we're going to do each month. Each time we come to site and then there'd be half a page, a couple of paragraphs about, we also [00:58:00] have a analytics platform, which we're going to deploy on the site and we'll use it.
And that was the extent of the scope that would be described in these contracts. So we, realize that really the plan per preventive maintenance scope just wasn't reducing down. And it just hadn't evolved along with the technology. And that this was certainly part of the frustration when we spoke with some of the ops managers on sites, is that, they say that their BMS technician rocks up to site and they know they come to site and they know that they're doing things out there in the field, but they have no idea what those things are.
And they're probably doing good. We just don't know what it is. Oh, absolutely. They could be good things. They could be. Um, they're probably doing exactly what they said that they would be doing in their, in their contracts, but often this wasn't being reported back. Uh, they're not chairing meetings with, um, with the key stakeholders, uh, and doing all the things that, third party, independent analytics [00:59:00] vendors are really, really good at, which is communicating the value of their.
To their client. And that's, that's certainly, I think where there's, there's a gap currently with incumbent vendors is that it's not that, their, their technologies, their analytics technologies are bad. It's probably probably very similar, fault detection rules, in the income and BMS contractors platforms, the probably the same or very similar rules that are out there in some of the market leading platforms.
Um, however, they're just not using it to their full benefit. And importantly, they're not communicating the value of what they're doing back to amp. So when we questioned question, these guys and said, Hey, like, we've been paying for this for the past three years. Can you show us what you've done out of it?
There was just blank faces. There was nothing that I was just like, oh, yeah. We've been logging into the tool and it's like, well, you've never given us one report. You've never told us, Hey, this is what we picked up. And this is the problems that we solved. It was all just assumed that this was [01:00:00] done.
And then of course, when, when we deployed switch and they were picking up all these additional faults, it was clear that obviously they hadn't been doing these things or importantly, that they hadn't actually reported this stuff back to us. If you don't communicate your value back to the client, that's almost just as bad as not doing it.
Bryce Anderson: Yeah.
James Dice: But so if I can summarize the state of like, when you guys did this study across the whole portfolio, there was non-competitive pricing. You didn't really have like a report back on the results you were getting, the scopes weren't the same. You had different definitions of what extra was extra costs were.
So can you guys talk about like what you did like briefly talk about? Okay. Given that initial scenario, these are the things that we did. Like if I'm, if I'm an owner saying I want to get my stuff under control, like you guys have, what is the roadmap for the, these, these maintenance contracts? [01:01:00]
Tom Balme: The first step, um, is to.
Do is find out what you've currently got in your portfolio and to create an understanding a baseline of your existing maintenance contracts. And when, when we went through this exercise with Bryce, we were just like, what key metrics can we analyze to determine how much we're paying, whether we're getting value for the money and whether we're getting good service.
So we took a look at probably three things. The first of all was, what is the price of the existing service contracts? And then we took a look at how many days maintenance are we getting for that price. So
Bryce Anderson: I've been quickly. I clock you quiet on that one. What happens is that what we also found is that with across the portfolio, we didn't always know how often the texts were coming to site because what's happened recently is that some of the smarter BMS companies have on note or refusing to tell us how many days the tech comes to site.
I've been a lot of meetings. And [01:02:00] the venous company says this is 150,000 Australian dollars a year maintenance, I'll say, okay, fine. I said, how often does the tech come to site? Well, we don't do maintenance like that anymore. It's all digitized. It's this. And it's that. And I say, but hold on a sec, is it one day a week, one day a month, one day a year.
Can't tell you that that's not how it was on how we do work anymore. So one of the issues we had was we just, we knew what it costs, but we didn't know when to expect the person to come. And that was also a reason why we wanted that thing way. We will tell you how often come to site, rather than that, you determine what that was.
Sorry, Tom, I've been distracted. You too much.
Tom Balme: They had no, no, no.
Yeah, no. I mean, that's, that's an incredibly valid point. Um, at a lot of sites we would ask the FM. I would ask the company how many times the technician would come to site and often we get an answer and then later down the line, when we dug into it, the answer was wrong or it just wasn't. Right. Um, they thought they were getting someone in.
One day a week, turns out they're only [01:03:00] coming 36 days a year or, twice a month. And there was a complete disconnect between what we even thought we were getting and what we were actually getting. And so, getting to the bottom of that, wasn't easy, but eventually, we found, roughly how many days maintenance we thought we were getting at each site.
And then we took a look at, what's, what's the size of the building and what's the content of HVAC and BMS in there, which was again, another really hard tasks. And I think typically when you ask a BMS company, you how do you price them as maintenance is, they'll say, we'll take a look at the number of devices.
We'll take a look at the number of points and then we'll come up with a plan that will then surface that concept of BMS. And then when we asked our contractors, okay, can you provide us with a points? This, can you tell us how many hardware and software points are in each of the buildings. We got some wild answers back, some tiny buildings that apparently had, like tens of thousands of hardware boards, [01:04:00] which clearly wasn't true.
They were just mixing up hardware and software points. So in reality, we didn't actually know, just how many devices and just how many points needed to be serviced. And so we needed to find a way to standardize and create a baseline based off, some key metric and what we ended up landing on was the square meterage of the building.
We could take a look at the square meterage of the building, the number of days maintenance that, uh, we weren't getting with what we were getting and then the price of that maintenance. And then that gave us a really good idea to understand, okay, how many suppose in a dollar per day or a dollar per hour metric, how much are we currently paying 10?
And we analyze that across the whole portfolio. And that's where the sort of wildness. Came up where we saw that, we were getting the same amount of days maintenance and the technicians time for two, three times the price at certain sites that had the exact same square meter region, probably a very similar number of
Bryce Anderson: points.
[01:05:00] Yeah. Look at it. Wasn't quite as simple as that, um, not to get into like the nuts and bolts, but originally the plan was to come with a simple formula that the size of the building and meters squared, you know, got us the answer. But when I first started formulating that ad and then cross-referencing the numbers that were spitting out against is my experience of doing this.
It didn't quite work as simple as that because when you have a, a 20 story building and it goes to 30 stories, sometimes you still got three chillers. They're just much bigger chillers or the air has just much bigger air handier. So it, it, wasn't always that a bonus double the size is double the cost.
And also, for example, if you had an extra 20, 30 floors of VAVs, we don't check them physically applied in the ceiling. We don't do that. So. If I spend days and days, Tom has noticed looking at this, this formula and this relationship and thinking like, Hey, but that doesn't quite work. So I basically just cleaned the sheet because originally tried to do it with points that was never going work.
Uh, as [01:06:00] Tom said, we went in the wrong numbers. People don't know how many points there are, but, um, then I just got, got it down. I've just built a spreadsheet, every 5,000 square meters. And I just thought to think about, okay, from the jobs I've worked on these SaaS buildings, what feels right? So it's not a straight curve that, as the building gets bigger, it gets more expensive.
It does shift a bit. And, and also the thing is once the building got smallish, there was still fundamental tasks that had to be done, even though it's a small building. So small buildings, the cost per square meter is quite high. But you've still got to do all those tasks, but a small building. So it works out that small buildings can sometimes, dollar per square meter or whatever it is can be more expensive than big buildings.
But I think circling back to your original question, cause we had digressed slightly. Yeah. Like if you're the owner and what you want to do. So the first thing that Thomas talked through there was you've got to understand your existing portfolio in the building and what is it? But [01:07:00] the one thing that I think was we spoke a bit about, the collaboration piece and we spoke about the specification and so that accountability to a process, a document.
The other thing we did was, um, Because I basically ran this exactly as if it was a construction project. I had, I wrote a return brief, we had specifications, there was tenders. I did the same process end to end that I would normally do. And in a, in a, in a normal project, you have a tender form.
The contractor fills in the costs for materials, installation, commissioning, project management, blah, blah, blah. So we'd create a tender form. And this tend to form, which is a word doc that they like to fill in. So there's, their proposal comes back into the tend to form that comes back and they have to onset exact questions that we're putting in the end, we created this kind of transparency and processing was that, that to fill-in the cost breakup of what maintenance costs.
And because we told them how many days you want you to be. [01:08:00] We had complete transparency on the technician's cost. So all we had to do then was find out, we know what the technician, I mean, days we know exactly if he dies at all and there's a cost for that. What are the other costs that we can't see?
Cause the issue with BMS maintenance or any services, maintenance, any, any system, security, anything lifts is that we don't know what the breakup of the cost is. We created those, those tend to forms. So now we know what is, so if your BMS system has a subscription service, which some do, what does that number?
And this is when it got very interesting because, and I'll give you an exact example. I wrote a few numbers down this morning when I was getting ready for this. Um, so we, this isn't real numbers from a, from a 10 to four that was filled out for a particular slot, someone Australia. So we had 87, we had a 87,000 Australian dollars.
So $87,000 is the technician. And because these are existing sites that had existing numbers [01:09:00] already. BMS companies were trying to fill in the hidden money in one of my breakup points because they had nowhere to hide money. Now you couldn't hide the money anyway, so the form says this, it says 87,000 for the technician with boots on coming to site, doing hard work 28,000 for the account manager and 10,000 for administration costs.
And Tom and I were sitting in these meet negotiation meetings. We were saying, hold a sec. You're telling me that for $125,000 a year maintenance, 30% of that cost is administration. And it was because they had no way to harvest money anymore before the process could be anything they want it to be. Now, the process has to line up in the cost breakup in the tender forms, they're all filling in and it was so bad, a little bit embarrassing.
And, um, they were giving us all sorts of answers about how they could justify 30% of the cost is [01:10:00] administration costs. We were saying like, so we had a few heavy, heavy meetings to get that straightened out. And that's also how we achieved, how we forced the preventative maintenance cost to be reasonable because resolve these problems.
We had sites that were charging. They put $6,000 for parking and they're coming to site one day a week. That's about $120 or $115 for parking. The parking is $20 and we're like, Hey, to say, how do, how are you charging us? Five times the prosper pocket, because the problem was they had nowhere to hide the money anymore.
So that's why, when I say to you, we have now amp has developed a base of what maintenance costs and what the cost breakups are for account management, administration, Hawking, full function, fire tests generated, we know what this whole thing is. Now. There's no more smoke and mirrors. Now. That's not, it's a bit unfair to BMS company.
And I felt very sorry for them. And I used to apologize all [01:11:00] the time, but we can't keep doing this the same way we've been doing it. This isn't we have to change. Um, anyway, so yeah, I guess there's a lot of things I've got to do, but the thing is that BMS companies, they have answers for everything. You need somebody.
Can counteract those answers. You know what I mean? He, a specialist person that knows exactly what question to ask. I'll give you another quick point. This is a bit of a soft story here, but what a, in a tender, a lot of BMS companies saw as an opportunity to try and get more sites. So some companies are saying to us, Hey, look, we can maintain five sites, not just our one site.
We support all these different systems. We support these different systems. They were telling us this. And I was like, that doesn't sound right there. So I'm pretty sure I know what system you install. So Tom and I would have these meetings with them and we'd sit in a meeting and they say, they do a PowerPoint and say, should we support all these sites?
We can maintain these, these BMS systems. And then now to say, okay, hang on a sec. So if that controller that [01:12:00] easy IO multi-vendor controller fails, what are you going to do about it? Are we going to replace with our own controller? So at the end of the discussion, none of the sites they were saying they could maintain.
They could actually maintain. So there's a lot of, you know, I mean, there's, there's holes everywhere. That'd be plugged. We can't in this discussion list at, this is what you have to do because it's a minefield and it is what it is because it's hard to fix. It's very hard to fix. Um, this isn't something that Toms would be forced to expand on.
You know, We were saying about this discussion around, it costs us money and it's it's extra, or the analytics with the incumbent. I remember the very first time I ever discovered this, I was in a meeting with the, with the, with the customer and the BMEs company. And they were putting in pricing for analytics.
So they were saying it's $50,000 a year for the maintenance. And instead it came, we're going to charge you $20,000 a year for the analytics. Now, I guess I said, hang on a sec. I said, why is it not [01:13:00] built in why not reducing it? Mightn't they say to me, no Nebraska, you understand we're providing analytics, not to offset man hours.
We're blind analytics to find faults quicker, which is true as well. Right? So the thing is that you've got to be armed with the knowledge to shut down all those, those points. You know what I mean? Yeah, and it wasn't easy. Like we spent six months to make this happen.
James Dice: Yeah. I mean, analytics providers can, can get into these meetings as well and hit these roadblocks and not know what to do either.
I've seen it a hundred times where the roadblocks aren't necessarily real to getting these things implemented, but you just have to be able to have the bigger stick or the right, right. Answer to the argument, that kind of thing. Okay. So, um, we're, we're, we're painting our roadmap here. We've just talked about how to restructure [01:14:00] the process for procuring maintenance contracts.
Right. Um, so we talked about pricing, we talked about the spec, we talked about scoping, um, Let's let's kind of shift. Cause I think that's a good set of best practices. Uh, people can call Bryce if they need more help than that. Um, let's shift to how analytics providers and BMS contractors can work together better, um, in this new world of data-driven maintenance or analytics-based maintenance, whatever.
So let's just kind of maybe spend a few minutes and talk about best practices that you guys have learned that you think are important for the general
Bryce Anderson: marketplace. Yeah. Well, the thing is they, they will work together quite well. Genuinely at BMS service technician just wants to please his customer.
Cause they're not that worried about money. Right? So, um, once you do all the stuff you've spoken about, once it's all restructured and the [01:15:00] service technician knows that when it comes to. The first thing you got to do is make a cup of coffee and then log into the workflow management tool and see what's assigned to him.
They will actually work together quite well. Um, I'm not sure that there's, I don't think about it. I'm not sure there's a long list of best practices. As a matter of once you've set up the process to work, everyone's signed up. I think it's going to work. Like we'll obviously find out the next 12 months as we've done this.
Cause this is just start in January sort of thing. We'll see how it comes out of the wash. But, um, I think that if you do the hard work upfront and it's very clear and it's documented it'll happen, the mistake that people probably make is they probably say, look, let's get the technology company on room.
I think that's coming a room. Let's talk about it. And that's what often happens in existing buildings is there's not necessarily a consultant, always that does the stuff that's when it doesn't work. Um, but yeah, any, any. Like, how do we get them to work better? I think that, yeah. I just think that you just got to get the stick out.
Right. And then once it's arranged, everyone is actually [01:16:00] happy at the end.
Tom Balme: Yeah. I, I think, that that previous battleground of, your, your contractors, planned preventative maintenance deliverables versus the analytics vendor, fighting for their time, how much do they do they spend on, with each person it's not easy for BMS technicians when they rock up to site.
Right. They, they fax, we have three bosses, they have their actual boss and their contracted deliverables. They have an FM who's going to give them a few things to do and is effectively their client. Then you've also got the analytics vendor. Who's going to give them faults and tasks and things to fix.
So the best practice is to clearly define how much time they should spend. With each of those components. So I think the first step of the way w w w we've got here is just to say, let's start at 50 50. So we want the first half of your day to be spent doing data during maintenance. And it's a clear line in the sand that a technician knows exactly how much time they [01:17:00] have to dedicate to Dodger and maintenance.
I think what will come out in the wash is we might find that maybe it needs to be 60, 70% at some sites, or maybe it needs to be less. Maybe it needs to be 40, 30%, but as a concept, we had to start somewhere. And that seemed like a logical starting point. So I think providing that clarity to the technician to say, Hey, this is how much time we wanted to dedicate towards this really helped facilitate that collaboration in that occasion.
I think this has been probably the fallacy of analytics companies previously is that they've just tried to describe all of the wonderful outputs and reports and dashboards and faults and insights that they were going to jail. And it was just assume that the technician would understand how to take those insights and then actually do that and then actually deliver an out an outcome with them.
What, what that means is that each technician at each site had to almost become a super user of these platforms. Of course, they don't get trained in EV like every single one of these platforms. I mean, there's tens, if not hundreds of these platforms out there [01:18:00] in the world is a technician supposed to become a super user in all of these.
And then a technician would come on a site, get maybe really good after a few months learning how to use that tool. And then they'd get moved to another site and you get a new technician and all of a sudden you're starting from scratch. And so that really prescriptive approach doesn't necessarily work at scale across a large portfolio.
So I think that's where the 50 50 time split really helps simplify it down to say, we know that we're going to get really. Insights out of an analytics platform, there's going to be faults is going to be wonderful. Grass is going to be wonderful data. There's wonderful reports that the technician can use.
Just give an allocation of your time towards that. And then you've still got the second half of the day left over. If your plan preventive maintenance needs that also have your boss and your FM. So that's immediate is probably best practice. Just allowing a clear amount of time in the technician's day to do
Bryce Anderson: the analytics.
The other thing I was just trying [01:19:00] to think through the, as you're talking to Tom, is that, um, we, I know these companies have to get away from this thing where they're beating up the BMEs company. Yeah. The service technician is very defensive, like stuff. These guys, I mean, I'm working, I'm working hard.
You have, you have a five years, 10 years and you're spitting out all this stuff you don't understand. So it has to be a point where the, the, the analytics company needs to understand how to best communicate with the BMS company because BMS companies are defending themselves. A lot of times collaborating and working with you, they are defending themselves from being attacked because they're being accused of being poor performance.
So I think that the technology companies can, can take that and try and think about how can they better approach this because you need the BMS company to be on your team. And part
James Dice: of that is, uh, just like as what happened here at amp BMS contractors, BMS companies wanted the analytics contracts, [01:20:00] right?
They were the ones that were trying to compete for that like portfolio wide contract. They lost to an independent third party technology provider. So I think it's, it's incumbent on the BMS providers to, to let that go and play nice to this new paradigm
Bryce Anderson: that we're having, but they need to be educated as well.
You're off, it's not just on one side. The BMS company used to learn, to let that go. Yeah, the wilderness changed. This technology exists. It's not going to go away probably. So they need to adjust that and be more productive, like in the spec, there's like a one line and it says that the BMS company will interact with the technology platform as if it was their own platform.
You do embrace it as if it was your own platform.
James Dice: Totally. So you guys also had, you were telling me last time we talked about this, you're, you're baking KPIs into the maintenance contracts as well. That's incentivize, or at least nudge the contractor towards [01:21:00] data-driven maintenance versus the old way of basically telling them here's what I want you to hit in terms of the numbers.
Can you talk
Bryce Anderson: more
Tom Balme: about that? Yeah. W when, when we were coming up with, with, with KPIs of how do we measure the success of this moving forward? So how do we, how do we be fair and how do we measure success? And. I think traditionally with analytics companies, there's always been this massive focus on energy reduction.
If you invest in analytics, we will find faults that will save you energy and optimize the building. And what would happen here is that you broke up to these meetings and the analytics company would be putting forward these quite complex energy saving folds, because that was what was going to make them look the best to their client.
But potentially I think probably negating the fact that there might've been all these other wonderful things, maybe not big in their minds, but you know, big in terms of the contracts and how it makes them [01:22:00] look good to say, Hey, there's actually a bunch of, faults that will actually need to be addressed as part of this as, as part of your day.
So what we wanted to do was kind of a way of saying let's let's decouple analytics and vendor KPIs away from, from. And let's focus on just two things. And those two things are closing out as many data-driven maintenance tasks as possible within the scheduled time and engagement and collaboration. And if we focus on those two things, we know that all of those other things are going to be delivered.
So we will save energy, we will improve them or comfort. We will increase. Um, we will increase the lifecycle of the, uh, of the equipment. And it's really those two key things that we're tracking. So we're just looking at how many times people are logging into the platform. How many comments are they making?
Uh, and how many data during maintenance tasks are they closing out each month? [01:23:00] So it's, it's really just seeing are the contractors engaging with the platform and are they closing out tasks? Because we know that if that partnership works, then everything else. All those things that we just discussed will happen and come back
James Dice: part of this, right, is making sure that the software that's selected can come up with valid faults and prioritize those.
So that the things that are getting assigned to the maintenance vendor are the top priority things that are then driving them as energy
Tom Balme: savings, et cetera. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's not necessarily just heading those really heavy sort of high priority faults. It's also mixing that in with, some of the low level stuff as well.
So it's not just saying, Hey, I want you to spend two days, sorting out my chiller staging. I also want you to spend a bit of time. Here's your top 10 worst performing VAVs and this is the reason why I also want you to spend time doing that because then will comfort is also an issue. It's not just about tackling the real.[01:24:00]
High-impact energy saving things. First one use of balanced that time, so that you're also providing value in other areas, as well, as opposed to just saying guys, we're going to go through the biggest energy reductions. We're just going to focus on that and then we'll get to the, to the smallest stuff, because we also care about the smaller stuff as well.
Bryce Anderson: Yeah. I, um, I learned a lot through this process because I didn't, most of the KPI development was with Tom and the amp team and switch, et cetera. So I just basically just wrote up what or copied and pasted in what they, what they'd written up. And I was, I really liked this idea and I'm going to stop you reiterate this, but it is near impossible to prove energy savings as in kilowatt hours.
It's almost impossible to prove that, like on any building that's investing in technology, they're probably also investing in like led upgrades and chiller upgrades and, vertical transport know control, some upgrades, facade stuff. So there's all this stuff happening in these, these big assets.
So, any specification that talks about achieving, Energy efficiency savings is looking for trouble. [01:25:00] Um, and yeah, I, I loved the, I loved the way that they said, look, as long as you log into the platform and they're tracking that don't have logins. And as, as Tom says, they're making comments in the platform.
The other thing we tracked was, um, we got switched to build a thing where, um, they can input how many hours per day they spend on the data driven maintenance and the hours they spend on preventative maintenance, the 50, 50 split. So we can try and track that. And it might not be possible sometimes as much as be more of some sort of a problem, but as long as they are spending the right amount of hours or generally over a 12 month on high value activities and still keeping up to date with preventative maintenance, if you stopped doing preventative maintenance, the thing will stop working.
Um, so like Tom says was like, as long as you're all doing the right thing, what you actually want will come out of the wash. Don't try and monitor that. That was fantastic. I love that. Cool. And
Tom Balme: so, I mean, just to [01:26:00] expand on that, I mean, even, this, this, um, new, new daydream maintenance contract came into effect at the start of this year.
And what we've seen just even in the first couple of months is a real uptick in the amount of both data, doing maintenance tasks that had been closed out. And we've seen by far improved collaboration between the analytics vendor and the BMS contractors. So previously we were averaging, I think, around about a sort of 30 to 40% closure rate on tasks.
So to translate that, if switch were escalating 10 times. Per month at this site, the analytics vendor was closing out three to four of those. We're now heading 70, 80% closure rates purely just by having the correct process to find as to how you're supposed to work together. What that means is we know that if we close out more tasks and we improve that collaboration yeah.
All of those wonderful things will happen. So it is still early days. Um, but we've definitely seen an uptick and this is, [01:27:00] this is purely just by hitting it on the service contract side. And I think to touch on that point, you said before James, there is that, I think the analytics vendors have also clued into this as well.
Right. So they're trying to solve that problem from the platform's perspective as well. There may be. The user interface and the user experience much more friendly for contractors to get in there and use it. They're spending a lot of time, uh, improving the actual diagnostics, improving the fault detection, getting rid of false positives, providing more valuable insights.
Um, and certainly if we attack it from both fronts, we're going to get to the right outcome. I think just by solving the problem with the platform, just by creating a great platform, doesn't necessarily mean, the, your service contractor is going to deliver you a great if they're not incentivized to do this.
And that's, that's always been, I think some of the frustration from some of the analytics vendors, they're just like, we're building these great things and we're making it easier and easier. So why are we not getting the traction that we necessarily wants to see on these sites? And this is where if [01:28:00] you, if we set this up right foundationally with the contractors is that you can turbocharge the.
Both your data driven maintenance, and that's really what we've seen. Um, and it's not through by just relying on the, on the analytics platforms to innovate and create these great solutions. It's just like creating that partnership between the contractor and the vendor, because, analytics as a product, doesn't generate an ROI by itself, unless someone takes that insight.
And so there's an outcome with it. It doesn't matter how good the platform is. Eventually you'll just have this platform generating a bunch of great insights and faults that no one will do anything with. I think that's, that's definitely been the frustration that analytics vendors have always seen. Um, it's just trying to get this way of getting everybody on the same page to do good.
Bryce Anderson: Totally.
James Dice: So we're running up on time here. I want to sort of like conclude by summarizing sort of the outcome. That other owners can [01:29:00] expect if they implement this sort of program. So one of them and you guys correct me if I'm wrong, I'm going to go through the list though. It sounds like one of them is just reduced preventative maintenance contract costs.
Right? Another one is, um, better implementation of analytics faults. Um, so higher, higher implementation rates. Another one is more efficient for the dollars that you're spending on maintenance, better outcomes for those dollars. And then it sounds like another one is reduced reactive maintenance costs through unplanned work orders.
So that's a pretty compelling story that you're in
Bryce Anderson: towns. Parents seem promising
James Dice: and transparency and pricing. Yeah. I mean, that's a pretty compelling story if we could. That's why I wanted to do this podcast. If we can get that story out, I think that's, that's pretty compelling from an owner standpoint,
Bryce Anderson: for sure.
Yeah.
Tom Balme: Yeah. I mean, some of the outcomes, that we [01:30:00] touched on there, in terms of the data to a maintenance, you know, we're getting more high value, data-driven maintenance tasks done that that's been one of the key things, it is early days, but we've seen an uptick already.
The other key thing that we've achieved is we achieved the 21% reduction in our BMS service contract costs. And this hasn't been done by, just screwing the contractor over to say, guys, let's just reduce your hours, reduce your days. We've actually only reduced. Uh, the number of days across the portfolio by about 7%, but the cost has reduced by 21% because the contractors have come to the table and said, yes, okay.
We understand what you're trying to achieve. And we're now going to give you a price that's actually fair and relevant for the outcome. And so, a 21% reduction, across 35 buildings, was, was, was a very big number. Um,
Bryce Anderson: I'm sorry. The other thing is, sorry, I'm keen to see at the end of this year, we'll get reduction of work orders because they're coming to meetings now and they're, they're [01:31:00] actioning tasks now, tuning systems.
So I think they were getting another saving at the end of the year on reduced work orders, which is going to be another very big number.
Tom Balme: That's right. I mean, there's, there's a very real chance that by going through this process, Purely just on the BMS cost reductions alone through service contract cost, reductions, and reactive work, or the cost reductions that that will actually completely offset the cost of analytics without actually having to save a single dollar of energy.
We know that the owners will come right. And then when it, where we're not going to have that really awkward conversation that a lot of analytics providers have with their clients after two, three years. And it says, okay, great, you saved me all this energy. What next? Why should I keep paying you? It's a really tricky conversation to have because you then have to re shape your value proposition to say, ah, but you know, did you know, we're also doing all these things, we're getting more value from service maintenance contracts.
We're increasing asset life cycles, [01:32:00] but if you've been really hard upfront about saying analytics, saves energy, at some point, someone will ask you, well, how much more are you going to save and why should they keep paying you? And that's really. We've already created that OPEX reduction in our budgets and that's budgeted for the next five years.
So that that reduction has already been made and it's already offset the cost of the analytics. So we know that those energy savings will come and they'll continue to come. So all those wonderful outcomes will now just be the fruits of our labor of, of going through this exercise. And we won't have to have that awkward conversation, or we want this to be, part of the new way of doing BMS maintenance.
And we've also started doing this on HVAC as well. Um, we didn't go through the exact same process with each factory. We went through, um, an alternative method with HVAC and we also got a significant cost reduction in our HVAC maintenance contracts as well, and hopefully reactive work orders as well. So there are, there are multiple benefits that can be [01:33:00] delivered, um,
Bryce Anderson: process
James Dice: double click on HVAC.
So we've just been talking about control system monitor. As all of the different silos in the building start to become digital and be able to be monitored. It strikes me as like, and you've talked about this with me before it strikes me as a natural progression to apply these same concepts across other digital systems.
So how do you see, like, what does this mean for other systems in the building, as far as what you guys are thinking about from a maintenance standpoint, moving forward?
Tom Balme: Absolutely. Um, all these other subsystems, whether it be vertical transport or access control, all the vendors, and now extracting data out of these systems installed in gateways and they built their own analytics and dashboards.
Um, and. There's certainly lessons that we can learn from that. I think the journey that we've been through with BMS and apply these learnings to all [01:34:00] these other subsystems, certainly if, if we, all these wonderful data-driven maintenance and, insights and dashboards and analytics are going to be produced, but realistically, if from a service contract perspective, if that's not going to change, they're fundamentally going to keep doing planned preventative maintenance, the same way that they'd been doing it, whether it's a lift or if it's a light or a metering solution, is that if you're not going to evolve and incorporate data-driven maintenance within the value of the contract, as opposed to selling it as a, as an additional add on, then we're going to go through this whole process again of, okay.
Saying, Hey guys, why we pay more for our, for our service contracts and why we pay more and more each year when you're telling me that you've got these wonderful tools that can do things in a smarter way. And we've even had conversations with some OEMs, um, who have openly even said to us that, we started developing these data-driven maintenance solutions, but [01:35:00] you will pay more for these things.
Cause we're not going to change the way that we do our maintenance. They'll, they'll, they'll tell you that, you still need to do all of that plan pro preventive maintenance to maintain the systems properly. And that the data during maintenance solution will just be this additional,
Bryce Anderson: those services are five to 10 years behind the BMS in this journey.
That's what it is. They're there five years ago. So they will get there. We who's going to play that same game.
Tom Balme: Yeah, it is. It is. But you know, we'd like to think that we could take the learnings from BMS and apply across these, uh, we can
Bryce Anderson: assist, we could have that same battle. Again. Sounds fun.
James Dice: Sounds fun. Well, maybe we can do a future episode on what it looks like to apply this same concept across the other silos, but, uh, for now I really appreciate you guys coming on the show. This might be one of our longest episodes, but I think it was worth it to dive into the details. So thanks so much you guys, for sharing your, [01:36:00] your journey.
I think it would be useful for, for others across the world.
Bryce Anderson: That's a pleasure.
James Dice: All right friends, thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus Podcast. For more episodes like this and to get the weekly Nexus Newsletter, which by the way, readers have said is the best way to stay up to date on the future of the smart building industry, please subscribe at nexuslabs.online. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. Have a great day.
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